


high above the whole scene

by the hyacinth girl (arguendo)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, Travelogue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-17 09:47:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 25,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13074294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arguendo/pseuds/the%20hyacinth%20girl
Summary: A tour of Europe in ten photographs, the summer before the Kerberos launch.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> written for a request of slow-burn sheith sight-seeing in europe, travelogue style. i've taken some liberties with the sights seen in this fic, and hope that those familiar enough to recognise them will forgive me.
> 
> as a forewarning: this is literally 25k of nothing but architecture and blatant tragic catering to europe's tourism industry. mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. i don't know what happened, but let's agree to blame 2017.

Later, when the Garrison takes inventory of Takashi Shirogane's personal effects, some things will slip through the cracks. 

It's standard procedure. They'll confiscate all notes on institute projects. His textbooks will be boxed up and shared out between poorer future students. To his far-off family, the Garrison will return the old exams he'd kept and celebrated, the nodding cactus knick-knacks that he'd bought during his first year, old ID cards and half-finished letters, black doodles in his ring-bound notebooks—all that's left of his desert years wrapped in paper and twine, clipped with a condolence.

No one will know what to do about the photographs.

The first photo has no name, no pixel-cut date, no responsibility to an organised timeline. It's an image that lives for itself: just a boy struck gold by sunlight pouring through a giant foyer window. His back's ruled straight. His black hair's all snarls, at odds with a cadet's jacket whose starch wafts off the glossy paper. One elbow, gaudy in its orange sleeve, rests on a tinfoil satellite with wings wrapped in gold-leaf. 

Here and there, the outside world glances off the photo in points: a thumb's streak along the border; a hand-lettered sign laid along the sill, blaring _DO NOT TOUCH INSTALLATION_ in black ink. The floor is white tile. Every pane's spangled with afternoon light. A reflection sways in the glass like a ghost: some bespectacled stork of a man hurtling into the foyer, flapping open-mouthed outrage in his white coat. He appears to be pointing at the sign.

But that's background color, summer white noise, a distraction at best. The boy doesn't seem to exist in the same space. He's lifted his chin, and his gaze burns with its own fearless light. He looks nowhere else.

 

# *

 

"You already took a picture in the lobby."

Shiro tilts an elbow against the seat, watching the roll and arch of the land, a golden riot of summer-dry grasses sweeping out to the fences. "You say that like we can have enough pictures." A palm steadies his phone, lining up the shot; his smile crooks. "Come on, Keith. Think of this as a vacation."

"If it's a vacation," Keith says, only a little under his breath, "why're we going five miles an hour?"

The shot snaps; the shutter effect hisses, and Shiro looks over. "Not everything's built to take your kind of speed, you know."

On cue, the cartjumper jolts under them in a rattle of wheels and gears. Something beneath its hood sputters and it goes grumbling down the sloping path, clumsy the way only a prototype can be. At Shiro's nod, Keith scrawls a crabbed note into the cartjumper's experimental record. "Yeah, well," he says. "We could fix that."

"I think the directors'll notice if we bring back their latest project with a new fuel injection adjustment unit. And besides, the autopilot's only programmed to run around the ESAC campus. If we went any faster, we'd be back way ahead of schedule. Unless," his grin quirks under Keith's narrowed eyes, "you _want_ to listen to a bunch of scientists arguing about rates based on amortization of a mechanical patent's value over time."

Keith doesn't answer, but the clipboard tilts against his knee with vague, ominous intent. Shiro lets it go. If ever a cadet could win a fight armed with office supplies, it'd be Keith.

The tour's set to run for an hour. But they could burn a full day out here on the magnetised rail, winding along the campus's tidy plains, its three satellites, the blocky golden ruin skulking on a distant golden hill. A half-hearted breeze rakes up the scent of loam from the grass, earthy and deep, nothing like the dust and hot steel of home. The sun's just hit its peak, a brilliance that's knocked the sky sprawling. Everywhere, the day burns blue, blue with the kind of bone-deep ache that only summer brings. 

But Keith's already craning to look ahead, too restless to tangle himself in the details. "Where's the landing facility, anyway?"

"Well," Shiro says. "This isn't really that kind of institute."

"The European Space Astronomy Centre _isn't_ a space institute."

"Madrid's the science branch for missions heading out of Europe. That means they run mission support, testing, and data gathering. Basically, everything that comes back to Earth from the European flights goes through them. About the only thing they _don't_ have is rockets."

Keith settles back with the thought. "But you're saying that they probably _do_ have a data table on alien landings in Europe."

Summer light's wound gold through his flyaway dark hair, softened the jut of cheek and jaw with a drowsy halo. No photograph in the world could hold onto this: the world swept into glimmering and gauzy color without shadow, the way Keith has of tilting his head just so, all easy unfaltering curiosity. Under the brimming daylight, there's a sense that any distance between them must be only a trick of the light—something that he could smudge away if only he reached out. If he curled his fingers under Keith's jaw.

Shiro smooths over his thighs. "Sure," he says, clasping his knees. "Now, if only you'd studied hacking at the Garrison."

"How do you _not_ want to know what they're hiding?"

"Actually," Shiro says, bland in the tone that always gets Keith's brows to snap, "I'm happy to take this one on faith."

"What's that mean."

But the cartjumper's already wheeling along the last turn. It grunts to a stop before the blocky white rise of the institute. Shiro clambers out to check its shell for any damage. "Aliens are out there, Keith," he says, stooped over a stabilizing rail. "I can't believe you'd doubt Fermi's paradox."

Keith rolls his eyes up to the sky.

Together they head up the steps. Voices are ringing all about the linoleum hall, the mumble and chatter billowing like steam from some room out of sight. Elsewhere, someone's telling a complicated joke about orbital mechanics to a concerning chorus of laughter. Under the echoes, Keith slings him the sidelong dead-eye of a boy who's used up a lifetime's quota for pseudoscientific thought experiments. "Say that last thing about Fermi a little louder. I bet you could start a fight in here."

"And give you an opportunity to break into their database while everyone's distracted? That'd be pretty irresponsible of me."

"Pretty sure it's only irresponsible if I get caught."

"Off the top of my head, I know there's at least one easier way not to get caught doing something bad. Come on," Shiro adds, turning towards a glass bridge. "I think I hear Fraser over here."

"Then we're definitely heading the wrong way."

"We're just going to check in on him. We don't have to talk to anyone."

"We don't," Keith says, with fatal emphasis.

They drift out from the bridge to a white-barred gallery. On cue, Fraser's voice froths up from the room below, his clipped accent gone nasal and blurry with glee, _something something significant magnetic remanence_. Canteen rumors have it that Fraser had wrangled his way into a position as the Garrison's visiting instructor by way of combining his pilot's record (excellent), a steel-keen memory for all the trending topics from this month's issue of _Physics World_ (just deep enough to horrify any first-year Garrison cadet), and discreet hints of blackmail (inevitable for anyone hoping to make tenure before forty). Privately, Shiro's put Fraser's hiring down to the man's ruthless capacity for talking over anybody who tries to break his flow, not to mention his dead, dead eyes. But new stories are hard to come by in a desert. Fraser's certainly basking in his spotlight. There's no harm in letting the gossip mill spin a little. It's certainly better than feeding it himself.

"Technically," Shiro says as Keith slouches against the railing, "we're on this trip as support. Our only duty's to pilot the cartjumper while Fraser handles the presentation for his patent on it to the ESA directors in five cities."

"They didn't need two of us to pilot."

"Procedures dictate that Garrison-approved prototypes have to be manned by a crew of at least two pilots from the signing institution during its testing phase. And I wanted you to come with me." His smile crooks as he glances over. "Though I'll be honest—I wasn't expecting him to be this... excited."

In answer, Keith rolls a shoulder and looks down. The lower atrium's slipping from organised clockwork to a storm. Pages rustle and snap. The wheeled tables grind like teeth, rattling with laptops and towers of stacked binders. Directors and engineers are flocking between a triangle of whiteboards, pausing to check a data table or wage small, dignified scuffles over markers that haven't run dry. Only Fraser cuts through the chaos without a missed step, a human megaphone with an amazingly inconsistent accent, all swagger and sharp shoulders and a bouncing black rat-tail.

"We could always leave him here," Keith says. His eyes narrow. Below, Fraser's swerving again from some nasal twang out to a geographically indeterminate drawl. "Maybe if something runs him over."

"When you say _something_ , I really hope you're not talking about us."

Keith shrugs, every inch the boy who's never been told that body language can't replace actual speech. "The flyer's autopilot could always come to life and back over him. It's not murder if the program's the one that hates him."

"Killing's never a solution, Keith," Shiro says, the patron saint of stern responsibility. "Technically, it's not even a full sentence. Unless you mean—"

"Don't say it—"

"A _life_ sentence."

Slowly, slowly, Keith's glower swings back up. "Maybe it could run _you_ over," he says.

 _Too slow._ A hand plunges into Keith's hair, scrubbing down in a rough fond swipe. At once Keith's yelping, all of his flat-browed dignity flung to the winds. He lunges. Together they go stumbling back, his arms locked in Keith's grappling fists, all their little sounds of indignation and scuffing boots hissing through the glass and the white air.

They thud back against one of the endless steel doors in the end. Keith's thumbs dig against the base of each palm. A breath shakes him as he braces over Shiro, gasping and bright-eyed, all his desperate pilot's focus pinned to this moment caught between them.

Adrenaline sings in his ears. Shiro twists one wrist, then stills again. "What?"

Keith leans in. "I _said_ —that's two fights. I'm definitely ahead now."

This close, his flush burns like a flame pressed thin, fever-cheeked under the gallery's fluorescent lights. Each breath gleams between them, heavy with laughter that's been crushed down but not gone. Shiro swallows. Once. Twice. "Well," he manages. "All right. So what's your prize?"

Keith's gaze holds. His mouth quirks, struck by some glimmering private thought. He lets go. "Next time," he says, "we go somewhere where we can actually see the stars."

Shiro straightens. His hands flex; the echo of Keith's grip beats with his pulse, steady as a countdown. "Sure," he says at last. In the quiet, it's almost easy. "Next time."

 

# *

 

Photo: Keith, standing before a line of white terminals. Each station perches between screens in a row: thick keyboards, ragged mousepads, silvery monitors glinting with tables and data in military lines. His hand's braced along the alcove of one screen; with the other, he's pinching a floppy disk. Its title leers between thumb and forefinger: LAUNCH DATA 2018.

His face juts with stony, incredulous horror.

 

# *

 

In the end, one of the administrative directors spots them through the railing bars. He beckons them down to the floor, where he threatens to dial up one of the endless stream of ESAC assistants to drive them out to the city. "There is no reason," he says, overriding all of Shiro's protests with a painstaking smile, "that you should have to be party to the clumsy negotiations of scientists. It's a beautiful day." He motions to a glittering expanse beyond some invisible window. "You are planning to make a circuit of Europe, no? It's a pity that you are starting with the very best city. Now the rest of Europe can only disappoint." 

"We're really not that hard to entertain," Shiro says, in the face of all evidence: Keith's already skulked off to scowl at a hasty scrawl across the whiteboard of the cartjumper's wing design.

"It does not take _picky_ , Shirogane—only taste. Perhaps you've heard? Paris's had a falling off in recent years—Madrid's much more in the style for young lovers these days."

Feet away, he can hear a marker's cap cracking open beneath the little conference's brimming murmurs.

He isn't listening, and then he is. Stillness settles over his shoulders like dust as the director's meaning sweeps through. "Oh," Shiro says, and shifts his weight to block the director's view as Keith starts in on the diagram. "No, we—wouldn't waste Garrison funds on a joyride."

"But Fraser was just telling me that he'd booked you all into one of our most expensive hotels."

His heartbeat holds; his smile brims gold. "You'd have to ask Fraser about anything he's doing," Shiro says. "Me and Keith—we're just here to do the flying. He's with me as my PM."

"I see," the director says, too loud; he taps the side of his nose as he bends back over a glossy binder. "Well, that doesn't make the day any less wasted for him. Eighteen is a good age to be away from home with a boyfriend."

The director's face has gentled into a nest of slack, baited lines: a slight smile; his brows gently arched beneath his bald, shining crown; eyes creased as the conversation rolls and coils between them like a cat's toy batted from paw to paw. He looks like a man who not only scents weakness, but must've built radar to light it up on screens for recording.

Shiro folds his arms, grinding down the impulse to duck his head or to fiddle with the lock between his brows. "Keith's not like that."

"Oh? He does not like pilots?"

Movement flicks at the corner of his eye. Keith's straightened from the board—conscious with an instinct that's always dragged his groping hand to the right lever or button, carved an upturn from a simulated dive too steep for anyone else to rescue. In a second, he'll lift his head. He'll look over. With his faultless dark eyes, he'll study Shiro's face and—

Shiro twists back to the director. "He's my friend," he says. Behind his back, he flicks a hasty warning before Keith thinks of making his way back. "And he's the best pilot in his class. If you're interested in finding out about his background, I'd be happy to bring you over to talk to him."

The director studies him—but he only nods. "No," he says. "Enjoy the day, Shirogane. That will suffice. Mia will drive you out to the city and direct you to your accommodations for the evening. I insist."

 

# *

 

Mia turns out to be a square grey figure with square-rimmed glasses and a boxy car. Her jaws are constantly at work, chewing a brand of rainbow bubble gum so sharp with color that it should blow out with corners. She talks with the plodding precision of a woman who's learned her English by memorising a newscaster's bland accent, and drives at exactly the speed limit. Two of these are things Keith's never been built to notice. The third's probably unforgivable. Shiro keeps an elbow tucked against Keith's arm, nudging idly whenever he tenses as if to stamp down some invisible gas pedal.

Down the way they go: past the satellite and the military line of flags standing outside the gates, riding the curve out towards the highway. The car sweeps beneath a wave of red railings and a bridge bannered in bubbling graffiti. The Spanish highway ribbons out in the same stretch as any across the sea: low cement railguards, striped black asphalt, hills rolling into grainy waves.

They drive on. Slow as a sea-tide, the scrubby plains give way to civilisation: a green guard-rail ribboning over a murky river; a pebbled divider between lanes; here and there a splotch of trees with glossy dark leaves. The bleached air flushes with afternoon light. Stubby palm trees sulk along the cement lane dividers, swaying in the arms of a balmy, dappled summer. Apartment blocks loom on every side, all blushing pastels and lacy black balconies—not alien, not strange, but unmistakably different.

It's here, at last, that the whole thing hits him—here, with sunlight gleaming on leather, Keith's shoulder bumping his, watching streets whirl past in an intricacy of modern brick and old-fashioned stucco. _Madrid, Spain_. The Garrison's a half-day's flight away by cartjumper, its deserts and steel still sleeping under yesterday's slow night. This is the farthest that he's ever been from home.

For now, but not for long.

The city downtown's all beach colors, sandstone towers shouldering offices glowing pink as crabmeat under the summer light. Everywhere, warnings are blaring: POR SU SEGURIDAD and STOP snapping around each turn like lightning. On cue, traffic coarsens to a treacle-flow. Mia glowers into the rear-view mirror; she taps a blunt, square nail against the dashboard clock, squinting under the furious calculations of a graduate student with at least five other appointments slotted into her afternoon.

By mutual agreement, she leaves them on a streetcorner with severe directions, a check-in point, and three different bus-scheduling apps loaded onto Shiro's phone. These Keith studies with furrowing suspicion as they loiter in shameless tourist fashion on the curb; his hand clasps Shiro's shoulder. "Where'd she want us to go?"

Shiro laughs, a bell-bright sound. Too quick, the phone snaps off. Keith's still leaning against him, close enough for his loose-blown hair to tickle an ear. "Well," he says, "we aren't getting grades on being good tourists. Let's take a look around and see what there is to see. Unless you have an idea."

"You don't want my ideas."

"Really." The question sticks, flat in his throat. He rolls a shoulder, thoughtful and deliberate, as he turns. "Try me."

Keith's dropped back; but he lifts his chin. "In the last ten years," he says, "Madrid's the only city in Europe where they found more than one alligator living in the sewers. There were also a couple stories about the construction worker who opened up a manhole and discovered a pig that got reported lost a year before that. They also get a couple pirahnas in the city reservoir about once a decade."

Silence washes up around them, splashed with echoes of passing wheels, doors opening and closing, murmurs gleaming out from faraway rooms. 

"You know, I think I just won't ask for the exact number of alligators that they did find," Shiro tells him. "How do you know all of that?"

Keith looks at him.

"Right," Shiro says, in the delicate tone of someone who's witnessed the corkboard in Keith's room. "Well, unfortunately, I get the feeling the sewers are a little hard to get access to."

"So just _pick_ something, Shiro. You're the one who did three months of research before we came out."

"I didn't—"

Keith folds his arms. He waits.

"I don't—think it could've been months," Shiro says, but his voice's gone weak. "I'd say—three weeks at most?"

Keith scoffs, the kind of dismissal that's as much bite as sound. But Shiro knows him: there's no scorn or disinterest in the set of his shoulders, none of the thousand everyday deflections that Keith wears like chainmail. His arms drop; he taps the grey sidewalk with a heel and turns for the closest streetlight. "Fine. We can just walk."

The sidewalk's teeming, ragged jean-shorts and speckled skirts swaying through the afternoon-slimmed shadows. It takes a little more effort to fall into step than usual in the crush. Shiro dodges a flock of knob-kneed children, pushes close as a stream of grandfathers goes plodding by. 

Too close—their elbows knock, and his heel scrapes Keith's sneaker. Their fingers brush, warm and bare.

Shiro falls back a step; he trails Keith's shadow across the grey brickway and into a sidestreet, where the crowds seem to wane and scatter. "She dropped us off in one of the busiest sections in the city. Based on the maps, there should be a couple museums within walking distance, no matter where we go."

"A museum," Keith says, considering. "Can you even name one work of art that isn't the Mona Lisa?"

Even above the sidewalk's lazy din, there's a curl to the question—something like a smile, the private easy tone that only ever seems to stir when they're together. "Van Gogh's Starry Night," Shiro says, taking up the challenge. "Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne. The Great Comet of 1680 Over Rotterdam—that was painted by, uh. Verschuier."

"Right. Are any of them here?"

"You mean, in the city? I... actually don't remember." But there's a question drifting beneath the question. "Keith, is the Mona Lisa the only piece of art you know?"

Keith's studying a store's metal shutter, littered with stickers of inky baby-eyed octopi and masquerade masks. "It's not like art can fly," he says.

"Keith."

"I guess it could if you threw it off a building. Think there's a museum for that?"

" _Keith,_ " he says, and means more—but it's all lost in the second Keith glances back, favors him with a slight, sunstruck smile.

They wander in loops, trailing the jagged grey-bricked roads—and once, accidentally, halfway down to the dead-end of a garbage dump. All the streets snake like alleyways, each probably cleaner than any of the dusty towns surrounding the Garrison. None of the names seem to mean anything: Calle de las Fuentes lies dry as a claybed, shutters drawn and scrawled over with graffiti; Calle de la Escalinata's a flat marching line of cafes and grey-green railings twisting thin and delicate as birdcage bars. Everywhere, something new: a wrought stone sill or a gleam of sky in a new, jeweled sliver between roofs.

But Shiro keeps his phone tucked in his pocket.

Four o'clock comes and goes, tolled out by some doleful bell just out of sight. They wind up riding a crowd's surge into a frilled block of a pavilion, its tinted glass crowned with pale thorns. This turns out to unfold into a marketplace. Lines of loose-boned teenagers and businesswomen wreath and stretch around a glossy, frantic hive of stalls. A plastic fan whirs at the foot of each wooden beam, warding off the balmy whispers of Madrid's easy summer. Down through the rows they go, trailing after snatches of lemon and garlic. Keith stoops over a case laid with crushed ice, where grey snails loll and creep across its splintering snow. Shiro winds up staring too hard and too long at a gleaming red bowl of angulas—which aren't, as the bustling stallowner assures him in brisk smirking English, _anything_ close to spaghetti. 

Keith's first to steer him away from the bowl's thousand beady eyes. "Walk it off, _Shirogane_ ," he says. It's such a terrible imitation of Iverson's clipped grousing that Shiro's startled laugh carries into the rafters.

Their shared fistful of coins and bills proves just enough to buy them a few boxes: fried potato chunks smeared in some peppery red sauce, crisped meat rolled in breadcrumbs, a box brimming with sliced sausage, and something that a girl in puffy suspenders and a flat cap swears is _fried milk_.

This, Keith challenges. "You can't fry a liquid," he says. "That's kind of the point of _liquid_."

"They fry Coke back at home," Shiro murmurs as the girl juts out a hip and narrows her eyes. Apparently it's his turn to start tugging.

"Coke isn't _supposed_ to be natural, Shiro. Anyone who fries it probably waits until it gets so old that it congeals—"

"At this point, I'm kind of afraid to ask what kind of Coke you've been drinking. Or not drinking, in this case," Shiro adds. "Should we be doing barracks checks more often?"

This squabble's an old rhythm, rooted in their bones. It lasts them down the mazy, endless displays and back. They argue about the frying possibilities for a liquid whose exact chemical comp's still unknown, about the conspiracy behind Coke's secret ingredient, about recent undergraduate experiments in building an engine fueled by soda—ducking under rafters hung with sprigs of thyme and dried dandelions, passing chalkboard signs and meatballs heaped like pyramids.

By the time they come in sight of an exit, they've collected enough paper bags to stock an army. There's a crowd clotting the wide double-doors, murmuring about the start of some show nearby; for every person who wanders out of the way, three pairs of elbows seem to prickle up at once, tangling the exit like a wall of thorns.

"Looks like we're going to have to take another way out," Shiro remarks.

Keith stares down at his armful, with its wafting spice. He lifts his shoulders, then his chin. A fist locks in Shiro's jacket. 

The walls blur and smear; the throng scatters; the rafters go spinning overhead as together they barrel through the throng, driven by hunger and that unique rage rooted in the tourist's absolute privilege. Out, out, out—momentum sends them staggering into Madrid's milky light and across the baked pavement, paper bags bouncing as tourists dive and wave their fists behind. It's only at the curb that Shiro snags the back of his jacket, digs his heels in and brakes hard.

" _Hey_ ," he says, and hauls up. Keith comes spinning back, thudding into the crook of his arm. "Not taking off without me, are you?"

Keith only looks at him, breathless and close. His lashes stutter; his startled mouth's still parted. "I wouldn't," he says.

His fist creaks. His pulse thunders. His tongue must rasp where it drags along his teeth. The world's all noise—noise flurries around them and goes flowing by, all the shouts and shrill horns of a city day. His hand's still knotted against Keith's spine; their shoulders are pressing together, still cool with the market's shadows. They've been close like this before: standing on the jogging deck above the cadet training room; a bout of impromptu wrestling across the Garrison's flat rooftops, Keith's chin digging into his shoulder while he scowled at a rocket's curving hologram.

Distance is relative, Shiro thinks. This is not the closest that they've ever been. This is not the farthest place he'll go.

He lets go.

 

# *

 

As it turns out, hunting down their food was the easy part.

There's a thousand places around the market for tourists to prop themselves into the sun and eat: the scattering of lamp pedestals, the spaces between the stone pillars which line the plaza, one of the thousand woven chairs abandoned by surrounding cafes and left to palely loiter. 

But Keith's a desert boy, used to the hisses of sand dunes, vultures, offended Garrison instructors. He narrows his eyes at the shrieking kids, the families flooding into the cafes, the admirers burbling at every statue and historical stair. Shiro steers him across the plaza instead, through one of the shallow weatherstained tunnels built into the stucco. They wind up settling under a bricked archway, its landing just muddy enough to be safe from interlopers. Takeout bags peppering the stone steps, they pick their way through their loot. Bags crinkle, forks click, and cinnamon goes puffing into the air, mingling with the rich warm scent of oiled bread, the sweetness of honey and thyme. 

The first box that Keith picks out turns out to be a box crammed with fried pieces, golden as buttercake, powdery with sugar. He sniffs one piece like a coyote inspecting a carcass, then bites. 

"Well?" Shiro says. "What's the verdict?"

Keith frowns at his fingers. "It's just a doughnut," he says in his darkest way.

"Huh. Mind if I try?"

He means to reach for the box, but Keith's hand comes up before his. The bitten piece gleams in the dim air, a fragment of sun in the archway shadows. Sugar glitters along its ragged edges; cinnamon wafts and curls on the tip of his tongue. 

Shiro leans forward. A hand closes around Keith's wrist. His thumb skims the delicate slope of a wristbone— _careful, careful_ —smoothing down as he takes a neat, small bite. The crumb of it unravels on his tongue, spice and sugar melting into dough worked sweet as cream. Not a complicated flavor, nothing familiar—but still crisp from a market oven, and carried with care.

"That's pretty good," Shiro says. His arm drops, fingers knuckling against a knee. "I think I might see where you got the _doughnut_ from, but—"

He stops. Keith's studying his mouth, brows twitching between puzzlement and something else. Too late, Shiro remembers himself: a thumb smears the sugar from his lip, and he goes digging through the closest bag for a napkin. Table manners: the backwards edition.

"Did I get all of it?" he says.

Keith jerks. His gaze swings from mouth to box, and down to the scrap of pastry crumbling between his fingers. He breathes out once, a hard shock of air. "Yeah," he says. "You did."

 

# *

 

Madrid's too big to cross in an afternoon, and they don't try. Instead, they go wandering across intersections webbed with crosswalks, along the narrow walkways crammed between cigarette and chocolate shops, into spidery cobblestone streets hung with chalked signs and iron-wrought lamps and out again. The streets blur into an endless reel of cafes and curiosity shops. Shiro buys five postcards while Keith looms over a pedestal of tiny ceramic animals: five spotted hippopotamuses, each a little smaller than the last.

In theory, they should hurry. Nothing stays just the same, and there must be a thousand things to miss today: new museum exhibitions; a lake gone green with summer; a scavenger's hunt to trail from statue to statue. But there's a luxury to this too: a chance to walk in step, stopping to puzzle out a tangle of graffiti or to sift through the copper-framed menu of a photobooth on the curb. Here they are, together and burning daylight, Keith's hand on his shoulder as they steer through the crush. Like they've all the time in the world.

Daylight washes out in a lazy wave. The afternoon crowd goes clambering up the steps to their hearth-warm motels, all the crane-boned university students, the families plastered with sunhats and sunscreen, retiring for the night. Evening rises like a flare. Light goes tumbling, gold everywhere. One by one, the waking streets plume up into a cloud of cigarette smoke and cafe lights. 

Neither of them are quite hungry—but that's to be expected, given the time difference. Just because they can't feel it yet, Shiro points out reasonably, doesn't mean they don't need it. Keith looks at the lamp-lit cafes—overflowing with clinking, chattering diners, waiters all sailing dark-eyed grace in red jackets—and crosses his arms.

"Just so that we're clear," Shiro says, thoughtful. "If you fall over, I'm going to carry you back to the bus-stop in my arms."

"I'm not going to _fall over_ , Shiro."

"It wouldn't be the strangest thing that could happen out here. Everyone knows you're bound to get sick once on vacation. You could think of it as getting the worst part out of the way."

"Are you sure _you've_ ever had a vacation before?"

A smile flashes out of him, a last bright burst from a day brimming with light. He can't help it. "Not like this," Shiro says.

His hand stops above the white joints of an empty chair. They've drifted into the haze of another cafe. Metal tables cluster around a slight red door, and a fleet of parasols gleams gold by lamplight. The scent of its cups and laden plates weaves into the street, salt tangling spice—and something a little warmer. Shiro looks up as a glass goes swooping by on a waiter's tray, its rim clouded with brown sugar, trailing a spice that twists in his throat.

Curious, Shiro sniffs again; but his nose's never been as good as Keith's. "What _is_ that?"

"Coffee?"

"It might be—but it smells like something on top of that. Maybe we could get a cup of that to go." He turns his head just as the glass lands on the table and the waitress pries a matchbook from her pocket. The glass stem tilts between her fingers. She snaps the match along the table's edge, then touches flame to drink.

Fire roars through the glass, blue then red. Any whisper of coffee evaporates into bitter smoke and spirits.

"Maybe once you don't need your eyebrows anymore," Keith says.

They go on—slower this time, squinting at a phone-screen's worth of map as they trace their way back. The battery warning's a red-eyed glower in the dark, _low power, low power_ , though he's barely touched it all day. Rueful, he tucks it away as they pass between the clawing black gates of another wide-bricked plaza. Tomorrow, Shiro thinks, he'll have to look up _cell phone batteries_ after they land.

For now—there are worse things than getting a little lost.

They cross the square, and into the afternoon's wide, familiar street where Mia had left them. But here too, night's worked its theatrical alchemy over the city—struck new fire into the slouching neon signs, kindled grass-pale lights in the hollows between pillars, left railings and windowframes jutting through the dark like thorns. Everywhere, there's a craned head or some careful hand cupping a phone with a better-preserved battery; the street's lit with flashing bulbs and bubbles of laughter. By the crosswalk, a woman's hawking paper flyers in brisk, torrential Spanish, hailing strangers and friends alike with the same flourishing smile.

Definitely, Shiro decides, someone who knows the city.

He makes his way over while Keith hangs back, snags her attention with a wave. " _Good evening_ ," Shiro says—and too late, realizes his mistake. Five years of Spanish in elementary school were no preparation for this. The woman's relentless polish dims as she looks at him, blank with the studied patience of a sensible citizen spotting a tourist. " _Sorry. I am—a little bad. Can I ask which road? I am finding for dinner, please. I have a friend. My friend will be hungry._ "

The woman scratches her head, then shakes it once in a flurry of dark curls. She starts slow: a jab down the road, a few street names he half-knows and _there are a few places that will still be open, even at this hour_ —but it doesn't last. Name after name soon comes flowing off her tongue, sweeping and framing the flaws and virtues of each with her quick hands. Before long, she's talking as though she'd never slowed, directions peppered into a wide-eyed, cheerful flood.

Shiro flips up both hands, rueful and laughing surrender. " _Sorry._ I really—can't understand that much Spanish," he admits to the dry slant of her mouth, and tries again. " _Any restaurant or cafe that has a welcome for—_ tourists," English again, hopelessly. "Do you know anything like that nearby?"

Abruptly, she slings her head back, sighs a husky _ah!_ Her long fingers clasp his arm; in the crosswalk's idle breeze, she studies him, her lips pinching in thought. "He is your friend," she says in English, and nods past his shoulder. Her accent's better than his. "You like him?"

He glances back in spite of himself. Keith's still feet away, slouched against a pillar as he stares back. A fuming tension's knotted up every line of him: his shoulders bolted tight along the plaster, frown stitching black as his folded arms bristle. It's probably a good idea, Shiro thinks, to get some food into both of them.

He turns back to the woman's studying eyes. "I want him to have a good time," Shiro says, quiet and too honest.

The woman sighs again, the same violin-sweet sound. But she's flipping open her purse, zipping through two different compartments before she digs out a glossy card, scratched with ink and gold-leaf. There's an address printed along its edge. This, she presses into his hand.

"Good luck," she says, and grins wide.

 

# *

 

"I thought you said this was dinner."

He thinks that's what Keith's saying, at least. The club's strobing lights have wrecked the shape of his mouth into flashes. As it turned out, the woman's card had bought their way through the line, and a little table pushed into the corner. There's a bass rhythm thundering overhead; it hammers into his bones, cores down through his ribs to overwrite his heartbeat. The walls are throbbing with static and scratchy synth, songs stretching and snapping elastic in the air. Below their balcony, neon lights swing and whirl across the tiled floor, Lasers loop around hazy spotlights; violet-red-sky-gold flecks go cascading like a dust-storm. The whole building's brimming, from the balconies down to the main floor, bodies tumbling like a riot set to rhythm. Everywhere dancers are twisting together, waving and clawing through the lights like they're starving, like they're drowning.

Somehow, Shiro thinks grimly, it feels very much like a lesson from the universe about tourists who think they're too good to buy spare phone batteries.

He digs two fingers against his temple. "Well, we did get food. Technically."

A spotlight races across their level in a lightning stroke. Keith stares through its glare like a statue of judgment: arms folded, slouching, dead-eyed. Unblinking, he swipes the three fries off of Shiro's plate and tears off the ends in one bite.

Shiro winces, beckoning. "Sorry," he confesses as Keith leans forward. "Nothing else on the street was open. We'd already been walking for twenty minutes. I thought—even club food had to be better than no food. Are you still hungry?"

Keith cocks his head. He nods past the railing; two levels below, a boy's flung his head back over the bar, showy with delight at the heart of a giggling ring. His throat's bared; his arms drape pale along the counter, much to the glossy displeasure of the bartender sliding out drinks behind him. Another figure's sweeping her long hair back with one hand, tequila glass sloshing in the other as she stoops over his salt-gleaming pulse. 

"Only if you're the one ordering," Keith says, at his driest.

His smile skews. "Let's grab a bigger breakfast at the hotel in the morning. We'll be in the air for about two hours—you can look up a couple places where we can eat after we land."

"Does that mean we're leaving?"

"Well, do you want to stay?"

Keith's mouth crooks too: an echo, the ghost of a spark. "Not unless you want to dance."

Sheer sound churns around them as the chorus froths up, a string of distant fluting trills tangled in lashes of xylophone. Its drumbeat pounds beneath his skin like a fever. Under the shadowy wash of music and pressured sound, Shiro had leaned close and closer. He'd pressed his hand against the table as he bowed his head, not thinking anything but getting the words through—

But that's a lie.

In the dark, Keith's gaze holds as the lights shatter and spangle over his lashes. His lips glint with the oil of his stolen bite. There's no distance between them at all.

"Wait," Keith says, too sharp; Shiro tastes the click on his tongue. "You actually want to?"

One beat, two, four and six and nine. The bass rattles the floor; its buzz aches down through his ribs. His palm drags over the chair's arm. "It's not exactly _want_ ," Shiro says, and lets himself smile. His knuckles grind white as he sinks back. "But I thought you might be curious." 

"Do I look like I dance?"

It's a question like a knife—simple, but for its edge and point. Keith, for as long as Shiro's known him, has never danced. He's a host of negatives crushed into the body of a boy—doesn't listen to popular music, doesn't waste food, doesn't yield his respect before it's earned. He talks to the other cadets but he never quite falls in step. Shiro's caught him looking at pictures of the ocean with the dark, studying focus that he otherwise reserves for motorcycle magazines and conspiracy forums. He believes few things, and trusts fewer. He doesn't do things just to impress, to while away an empty hour, or to try something new. 

The smile's growing, in spite of everything; its light brims at the corners of his mouth, helpless and warm. "You look like you could do anything you wanted," Shiro says. 

In a way, it is that simple. If Keith does anything, it's because he wants to. But there's another way to look at it, worse and simpler still: he might dance if Shiro asked him to.

Between the stage's hollow lights, the last high trill shivers out; the bass rolls into silence. A ragged wave of cheers and clapping cascades from the balconies and over the glittering floor. In the quiet, Keith pushes himself up, jerks his head to the stair.

"Let's get out of here," he says.

They make it back to the first level before the next set comes thrumming through their heels: brassy notes and sitar-strings in a dazzling wash. The floor's just starting to churn with new colors. Lights spray along the walls, splashing from gold to sea-light blue, and drained dancers collapse artfully along the tables as new bodies wind out to the floor. 

Keith strides through it all like he's kicking his way through ghosts.

Shiro trails after him, dodging boots and elbows and the overexcited hip thrusts that always seem to kick off a set in some corner of a club. The crowd's still finding its feet—a cramp more than a real dance-floor crush. As the bass thunders overhead, a boneless figure comes stumbling backwards through the swaying shadows, spinning and punching the air as he topples towards Shiro.

A palm skims up his spine, steering him out of the way. The drunk pitches by them, whooping into the haze. At his side, Keith cocks a brow.

The next part happens in a filmreel sequence. The crowd winds closer in a tide churning high. His palm settles over Keith's hip to tug him out of the way. He expects the way Keith bolts tight, the stiffness in his turn, the restless jump of his fingers into fists. But one beat, two, and the floor's stirring back to life, laughter and crowing soaring in firework bursts—and Keith's hand is curving against his shoulder, settling their bodies flush together as new figures come surging in with the lights. 

His grip tightens, then eases again; his palm presses carefully over military cloth and bone. "Really changed your mind about dancing, huh?"

"It's just moving back and forth. I don't see the big deal."

Their voices flicker beneath the roar, the crackling speakers. They've settled into the kind of slow, heel-toe swaying that could trace its roots back to middle school dances—the kind with dripping banners and dyed, watery punch. The music's still building, an electric murmuring of promises without end into the lush blue night. Keith's still cinched rigid with tension, ticking from foot to foot—but he's leaning up too. 

"I guess it isn't," Shiro says. It's all he can say. All his focus's gone racing into muscle memory, holding onto the feeling of this: Keith, slight and warm and almost-still in his arms, fingers trailing over his collarbone in a felt constellation.

"We should probably head out," he manages as the melody comes spinning down. "We'll miss the last bus."

"Sure you've got enough pictures?"

"Let's not give the instructors any more dirt on you than they already have. You know the Garrison still has a few regulations on cadets and curfew."

Keith sighs, a snap of heat. Salt gleams on his upper lip, flecking stars across his neon-washed skin. "Last chance," he says.

It's the kind of moment that deserves thunder, invites stuttered steps and the upswell of a cinematic orchestra. But his pulse's running steady, steady as the new set kicks off, and the body tilted into his radiates nothing but sure footing and a familiar fever, a thousand little sensations that he'd memorised long ago. _Here_ , nerve and muscle memory tell him: their feet shifting to the same beat, Keith's palm at his shoulder and his thumb resting against the dip of Keith's spine. Here, now—there's nothing new between them, only a right that Keith claimed long ago.

Shiro laughs. Gently, he knocks their heads together, leaning in place just to feel the unraveling stiffness of Keith's spine. "My phone's a little dead anyway," he says, close and easy. "But I might have an idea."

 

# *

 

A photobooth reel, three snapshots in a row. 

It's a tiny space, dingy and dented: a bench, a ragged curtain braced up by three sulky taupe walls, a keyscratched line bristling in the corner. They're crammed together, thigh to thigh. Shiro's slung an arm around him, less as a show for the lens than to keep him from spilling into the street. Inexplicably, Keith's wearing his instructor's jacket. The shoulders puff like pastry; the sleeves gape around his narrow wrists. Club glitter winks from one eyebrow. 

The first flash must have caught them off-guard. Shiro's lifted his head, startled into a smile; but Keith's still studying something beneath the frame, pinching a frown beneath a fringe tufted with sweat. There's a sense that some moment between them's slipped just out of sight, left only two subjects restless where they've been pinned into ink and light, watching for the first crack in the gloss. 

In the second shot, Shiro's smile has burned clean: the glassy professional warmth of a man used to renewing his identification cards. Keith's looked up properly, too—mouth a perplexed circle, a hand still raking back his hair. In a second, he'll realise that his elbow's caught the booth's curtain, dragging in a splinter of rain.

The last image seems to skip a few frames. They've reshuffled themselves, untangled their arms and sleeves to lean side into side. Rain's stretched its dark fingers along Keith's shoulder. Shiro's grin has crooked, widened into bright, uncomplicated starlight. He's still half-turned as he reaches out to the screen, shoulders easy and his damp hair prickling; his thumb must've struck the booth's button just as Keith ducked his head into a laugh like a confession, secret and focused, warm all the way through.

 

# *

 


	2. Chapter 2

And so: Paris.

In theory, there's room for more than Fraser's patent analysis in the ESA's one-day meeting. The Centre National d'Études Spatiales is famous for its collaborative interagency research on terraforming and climate change, and the Garrison commanders have been talking about setting up a formal recruitment process for would-be ESA astronauts looking for teaching experience. If he's lucky, Shiro knows, his next mission's just the start. After Kerberos, there'll be projects on the International Space Station, where they've docked three of the latest compact flyers. Two of the astronauts who've tested the flyers started their careers at CNES. It's a good opportunity to touch base. 

But of course—there's theory, and then there's Keith's legendary inability to pass through any metal detector.

They leave Fraser and the cartjumper on the institute roof, parked just under the wirework installation. The CNES building sits at the very end of its street, just at the point where grey pavement melts into a shining, open stretch of brick. Daylight's just struck the archway across the little plaza. Light juts from metal like a crown; it coaxes new green from the vines winding through the mesh of the mazy pillars. Over and through the overgrown bars, there prickles the thorns and shadows of faraway turrets and slate-dark roofs. A castle or a cathedral, maybe—something mythic and weary down to its bones, sketched against a fairy-tale horizon.

But that's still elsewhere, a day falling but not yet broken. Each city keeps time to its own heartbeat. Down the street, the buildings still sigh with their gathered shadows. Daylight's a ghostly film over freckled white stone and the rows of square, staring windows. Passers-by float by like tumbleweeds; they totter out from doors and corners, winding between the stout blocks squatting along the sidewalk and into the bleary light. Still the street dreams on: flowerbuds pinch their red lips in their windowboxes, all the pale shutters clicked shut in a city at rest, half-dressed and breathless in its silvery morning.

They cross the pavement. Shiro's gaze flicks up as neon shivers and fizzes with red sparks overhead, its fine script grumbling under grime like a mothlight. He squints. "Does that say AT THE SMOKING DOG?"

"What?"

Too soon, Keith turns. Shiro jerks, twists out of the way and goes stumbling back. His heel jars into a cement block—but a hand lashes around his wrist, hauling him up just before he pitches into the road. 

Straightening, he winces. "Thanks," Shiro says, with a Madrid nightclub still pulsing behind his eyes. "Guess that flight took more out of me than I thought."

Keith studies him. The grip around his wrist eases, then unravels; Keith twitches a shoulder as he turns away. "Let's just get to the hotel."

Light splotches and thins out the milky sky as they head into the metro station. Cities might change, but public transportation's the same everywhere. Together they hurry down chipped, grainy steps, past the glossy orange seats and the holographic posters flickering over the scraped walls. A green-striped train comes whistling down the rail just as their boots thud to the painted edge. Inside the compartment, the air's sharp with the scent common to every train in the mornings: plastic, exhaust, disinfectant laid over faint rust. But the grind of wheel to rail's a song he knows, no stranger and no more sour in his ears than it's ever been in any other city.

He falls asleep just like that—his head on Keith's shoulder, dreaming to the hollow beating of the train's engine, new passengers thudding with grim joy into empty seats. 

The rest of the trip tumbles by as if into a cloudy dream. Later he will remember the trip in still-frames: boots dragging over concrete, the cheerful din of morning traffic swelling down the street, fluorescent lamps splotching light across speckled granite, gilded doors and a hasty signature. But in the moment, there's only impact: body thudding into mattress, the flower-faint waft of laundered linen.

Instinct pushes him onto his back. His eyes lid open as movement snaps past him: a flicker that twitches the curtains shut, hushes the light spangling through the windowpanes. Shiro smiles. "You're scowling," he says.

"You're going to have a hard time falling asleep if you keep talking."

He yawns, a jaw-cracking stretch of an answer. "You should check out the area while I'm down. There's probably a cafe nearby. Don't starve yourself because of me."

"I'll be fine. You didn't exactly get breakfast either."

"I'm ready to pass out after a two-hour flight. I don't think I'm providing you with the best example right now."

A hand thuds the headboard; Keith braces over him, scowl unchanged. "You'd be better if you'd stop trying to stay up."

Morning's blurred the room to smears and silhouettes. Shadows have rounded the lampshades; the next bed's a smudged island, the curtains thin as clouds where they've been drawn across the glass. Only Keith's still sharp with colour—gold jacket, a bitten-red mouth, rumpled black hair and a narrow stare hard enough to bruise. The kind of burning light that no distance could wane.

Shiro blinks once, shutter-quick, then lets his eyes slide shut. "All right—I get it. Am I allowed to plug my phone in, or should I consider myself—" another yawn trembles in his jaw before he crushes it down "—completely on bed-rest?"

His answer comes in a torrent of blankets: with a sharp pull, Keith's hauled the sheets off of the second bed. He rucks them over Shiro's shoulders and under his chin, crushing them into a cocoon around his arms, then stalks off while Shiro's still squirming in drowsy experiment. His footsteps cross the carpet, seething a loop from the bed to the desk and back again. 

Keith, he thinks, has a habit of moving like a storm. Luckily he's nowhere as hard to read. "Over here," Shiro says, amused. "Right jacket pocket."

He untangles his arms from the knot of blankets, shrugs off his pilot's jacket and lets Keith tug it out from beneath him. "I meant that," he says, as Keith goes rifling through his keys and spare coins with disturbing efficiency. "About not starving yourself. You don't have to wait for me to—"

"I don't have to," Keith says. "But I'm still going to."

A hand sweeps over his brow—presses over his eyes, dry and warm, clumsy in a way Keith rarely gets to be. Like a new manoeuvre, a block that hasn't worked its way into muscle memory. Known but not learned.

"Just sleep, Shiro."

There's a thought that should fit here, the understanding that comes before a good answer. Something about the way that the body learns. An act of caring versus an act of protection. The things that a body's taught and the skills it forges out of instinct and sheer desperate wanting. There's a difference, Shiro thinks—but understanding wastes away there, unravelling on the brink of shape as the world smears to pearl. 

He knows. He doesn't. He's thinking in circles, nonsense and smudging half-dreams. It's easier to wrap his palm over Keith's knuckles, let his eyelids sink with the weight of their morning exhaust. 

Just for a moment, he thinks. Just a little longer until he has to stop.

 

# *

 

He wakes to a shadow on his balcony.

As usual, Keith's taken a safe and ordinary pastime and dragged it to appallingly literal new heights. Scores of tourists must have settled along this balcony to watch night filtering through Paris—must've tipped their heads up to this sky like bleached brocade, these clouds shot to pearl. But then there's Keith: back turned beyond the curtains drawn back, perched on a corner of the railing, heels anchored along the curling iron as he studies the flooding afternoon.

Shiro eases the door open, crossing to the sun-glossed bar. Keith shifts, but he doesn't look back; his head's bowed with the same pinning attention that usually goes to simulation screens or a physics problem circled in red. "They say when good Americans die, they go to Paris," Shiro remarks. "Guess that's something to look forward to."

"Don't."

It stops him; but after a beat, Shiro risks a smile. "Not a fan? I know Paris isn't exactly the Indy 500, but I was hoping it'd be a good consolation prize."

"What? Paris is fine," Keith says, a boy raised by cacti and coyotes down to his bones. "That's not what I meant."

A question blurs his breath, half-formed, then flares up again as Shiro gets it. "You know, technically, not jinxing the mission is a NASA superstition. We're a separate division."

"NASA only started that tradition after New Horizons. At least that got to Pluto. You have to get there _and_ come back."

"Hard to believe I'm getting this talk from someone who barely studied for History of Astronomy so that he could take out the new flyers. Are you sure you aren't missing out on a career as a historian?"

But Keith turns away, watching the unfaltering line of cars stitching up the street, blue and faded chrome churring through the dusty afternoon. "I'll think about it," he says at last. "After I finish knocking your simulation scores off the board."

It sounds right, but sound's a misdirection. What's true in the desert is true everywhere: it's the silence that matters, the sunlit steel stretching between them like the dusty field from star to star, the way Keith isn't quite looking at him. Keith's always fought his battles to the end and left the rest to the dust. He's never had to learn how to fend off the little skirmishes and traps of anxiety and dread. He wears the marks of them clumsily—still following a meaningless pattern of traffic, shoulders knotted under the cadet's jacket, all fixed stares and prickling knuckles through the hard light.

Worried. That's the word. Keith is worried.

It doesn't suit him.

A sunray flicks through a cloud. Keith shifts. He kick a dull toll from the bars; his fist drags along the railing, knocking Shiro's elbow. The thin sense of conspiracy bursts.

He rolls a palm over his forehead, then tugs his collar upright. "So—next time."

"What?" 

"On our next trip," Shiro says. "So far, my checklist's got down— _must have good roads_ , and somewhere we can actually see the stars. Anything else?" 

Keith cocks his head; his lashes sink in thought, not quite steady. "A real ride," he says.

"'A _real_ ride.' You know, I remember when the Garrison prototypes used to impress you."

"I don't exactly need impressing. It'd just be you and me. The only thing that'll matter's if we can get where we need to go, fast."

 _It'd just be you and me._ Shiro curls his fingers against the railing, watching as the clouds crack in filigree across the rooftops. He doesn't reach out, though the feeling's impossible to answer in words. "Duly noted," he says at last, and turns for the door. "All right—now let's see where we can get a bite around here."

 

# *

 

They don't get a bite.

It's afternoon still, sprawling with sunlight, rays striking alight the flues and coal-black railings, spinning the streets to dusty gold. Paris is a city, glitter and grime, reeking and thriving; but history's made it into a vision too—framed it in camera lenses a thousand times over, refracted and repainted its shining roads and pale windows for film backdrops and history books, pressed its shadows into oil paintings and postcards as keepsakes. 

Something of its own mythology's seeped into the pavement over time. In Madrid they'd been anonymous, just two motes in a whirlwind, basking in the airy light. In Paris, the omission feels deliberate, like they're wandering between snapshots, forever caught on the fringes of someone else's interlude. Cafes coil with knots of dandies and students as they wander past, chattering under the flicker of red awnings in full sway. Would-be fashionistas stroll down the sidewalks in gaudy stockings and pink skirts wide as umbrellas. The daylight's burned hollow; summer's drawn the city down to its lazier beat. Everything's slow, slow and easy. Car horns and the river's distant rush seems to rise in a dreamy clamour. There's a sense of unreality that he can't quite name or displace—a stillness like a locked breath, nostalgia for something that hasn't happened yet. The French have a word for that, he's pretty sure—the heartbeat skipped, the wrong collision, fates missed but not quite lost. 

But he isn't thinking about phrase books, not really.

They wander on, ducking off the wider avenues to chase shadows, squinting at the artful silvery wedges of niche shops and apartment complexes. Paris has remade itself with the times, stitched bus and subway routes into its streets—but it's still a city best learned by walking. There's a thousand places they could go on foot. All the best tourist spots have been lavishly recorded, dissected and pinned in posts and holoshoots across the Internet. He knows about the Eiffel Tower, the Tour Montparnasse, the Grand Palais with its ironspun dome, the way it fractures the sky at dusk. 

But, as old wisdom has it, a pilot with no flight plan's easily derailed. Keith's fingers keep snagging his shoulder as they steer around corners. His palm clasps warm beneath Shiro's elbow while they're craning their necks at bistro displays lavish with wheel-wide bowls of bristling rosy shrimp. On the sidewalk, they push up and down through the midday crowd, searching for some sliver of a street-sign with Keith's mouth tipped up against his ear, grumbling and turning him back every time. 

It's a string of coincidental distractions, glancing little touches, nothing that lingers enough to make a moment out of it. He knows better than to keep track.

They head away from the river, tracing streets just to see the way the crossings change from cobblestone to glassy pavement. There's nothing here that couldn't be found in Las Vegas or Austin, or some of the more put-together suburbs in the desert—but Shiro really isn't above a little shameless tourist wonder. 

Eventually, when they remember to look, the map puts them somewhere in the faded crook of Les Lilas, where the buildings rise in juts of broken-down cathedral blocks and residential complexes stand in wedges mottled yellow by the merciless sun. The whitewash's aged and creased; every window glitters dark and smeared with shadows. Their steps scrape along gravel and the shining rubble of crushed glass as they cross the quarter's wilted cement and into the grey path of something like a park. 

Keith has the phone—he'd confiscated it half an hour ago, after speculations about the physical possibility of car chases through Paris's narrow one-way alleys careened into an actual debate, and Shiro walked them into their third dead-end of the afternoon. He spends five minutes swiping through the local marker-pins across the map while Shiro props himself along a bench, laughing.

"Figured it out?" he says, as Keith's brows snap up; his thin mouth's eased into the slight, familiar parting that means _success._

"Close enough." Keith's still studying the screen with a lens-clear look, a glare like a snapshot into memory. "But it might be kind of weird."

" _You're_ saying it's weird," Shiro says, easy. "Well, now I have to see it." 

The target, as it turns out, is three streets away: a dark little grove of bushes caged behind cement and wan, painted iron. A breeze stirs as they cross the street; inky red leaves wink and jitter between the bars like hooding eyes. But Keith flicks open its rust-eaten latch, goes marching down the pebbled path without a doubt. In the corner of the little courtyard, there's a shabby block painted black, a scarlet door framed in lines of red squares, its flaking knocker jutting with gold points. 

No—teeth. They're little gilded fangs.

Keith snaps fangs to door. They clack together like dice, or real teeth, rattling the wood beneath. 

The door creaks open, slow and sullen, to reveal a skeletal, waxy hand.

The owner considers them, eyes darkly lidded under her veil. At once she sweeps her arm over her black-lipsticked mouth. Velvet drips from her wrist; braids of it spring from her hair. She's velvet everywhere: heaped into a crown above her dark eyes, the lashes carved with mascara; crimped like wings around her plump shoulders and down to her elbows; massed into lightless blossoms around the hem of her skirts. The effect is less of a widow, or a creature of the night, than the splashy bottom of a vast black velvet waterfall. 

"Bienvenue au musée des vampires," the waterfall says, with the unmistakable dead-eyed regret of a teenager at her summer job. "Je devrais vous dire que tous les mécènes doivent payez avant d'entrer. Si cela ne vous plait pas, je regrette de vous informer que ce n'est pas de ma faute ou mon probleme, et je n'ecouterai pas les mensonges qui me disent au contraire. Me suivez-vous ou non, messieurs?"

Keith stares. Shiro stares. A little silence laces across the threshold.

"Sure," Shiro says.

 _Weird_ isn't even the first word for the painting looming over her shoulder, cat-eyed and streaked pale as powder. But Keith wants to see this. So they'll see it.

Taking a lesson from Madrid, he trades hand-signs with the waterfall, enunciating only numbers in his raw, gingery French in lieu of the useless cardboard phrases that he'd pried off of tourist websites. Five minutes of haggling later, they're summarily herded out of the leaden, sweltering day and into a dim hall glowing with black-sconsed lamps.

It must have been an ordinary residential suite once—still is, under all its plaster ornaments. Past its sleek, curving clam-bed of a foyer, there's only a single room. In every corner, there glimmers the half-buried bones of its ordinary life: cherrywood shelves, floorboards scrubbed pale by sand and wax, whitewashed walls squared under a warm light. Once, it might have been a room fit for university students, or serious businesswomen who dressed down in pencil skirts.

That was probably five coffins ago.

The museum's a polished cluttering, a nest for history and intrigue, a collection that looks less curated than hoarded over time. Here stretches a granite table scathed with glittering flecks; there stands a taxidermist's bat, clapped in glass, still half-folded from its clumsy flight. Prompted by irony or superstition, someone's arranged for lights everywhere. Electric bulbs moulded into low-leering spirit-lamps. Candles with sparks sputtering under glass flames. A moulded cartoon Dracula whose little face seethes green. Endless monsters and endless shadows, and a gothic-lettered placard at the foot of each.

One after the other, they eel between two coffin-boxes, down through a lane lined with frames of pinned butterflies and illuminated manuscripts. "So," Shiro says. "Vampires, huh?"

"No." 

He studies the back of Keith's head, bent to a dangling basket with blade-sharp intent. "I wouldn't say that my French is all that good. But I could have sworn the translation for vahm- _pierh_ was—"

"We're not here for the fakes."

"The fakes." He turns the echo over his tongue, tasting its suspicion. "Keith—did you bring me out to an impromptu vampire hunting expedition?"

Keith cocks him a familiar look: sooty lashes flicked low as he turns away, mouth tipping up to a curve so faint that it seems to vanish under a glance. He heads down the aisle, arrowing towards a platter under a glass bell. Amulets lie in a snarl, bristling and glaring with beads and cracked pendants; his voice wafts through their glow like dust. "You're the one who's always saying that pilots should prepare for the unexpected."

"I was talking about memorising flight protocols," Shiro says, one wary eye on a rope of half-gilded garlic mounted across the wall, watching as it sheds glitter and papery skin. "Unless science has seriously misled us, there are no vampires waiting in space."

A hand wraps over his. Their fingers lace, overlapping, tangling, wrapping tight. His gaze jerks down to Keith's lit-coal stare. 

"If I hold your hand," Keith says, "will you stop complaining?"

Every touch is an echo. Stretched back on the library's rooftop, pointing out constellations. In an empty classroom, closing a hand to move Keith's holopen across a desk's spinning diagram. Keith's fist knotted in his, mouth buried against his shoulder and his body curving close, a flicker of rest on the morning before a simulation test. If the heart of scientific proof is repetition, then this must be its constant beat: he's had this before, time after time. He'll have this again.

Granted, it's a little embarrassing to think that he's been so transparent.

"Sorry," Shiro breathes around the edges of a laugh. "I didn't mean to drag you down—I guess I was just surprised. This doesn't seem like your kind of thing."

"It's not."

"Then?"

Keith turns, tugging him on. Their linked hands hold, grip loose but warm, thumb smoothing a knuckle. Static uncurls under his skin, hazy and shivering with its private slow burn.

"People," Keith says, "don't always _get_ what they're looking at. A lot of natural phenomena used to get shuffled into categories that they didn't belong to, just because no one realised they were something completely outside the system everyone understood. Humans have been all over the planet by now. If there's something we're missing, we probably already have the evidence to figure it out. What we need to do's look at the places where the pieces don't fit."

Word by word drops into the hush, each clear as a heartbeat.

"So," Shiro says. "Is there a name for what we're going to find in here?"

Keith rolls his shoulders; the line goes tense and slack again in a spark. "I don't know," he says. His grip flexes, and Shiro moves before the thought's half-formed to follow him down a new row. "But I figured—maybe it'd be worth seeing. A vampire's just something that came back from the dead when it wasn't supposed to, right? After everyone thought it was gone. And even if none of the stories in here are real—they're still about people who came back."

 

# *

 

Three photos again, a night pieced together by some cheap tourist's camera, crisp to the brink of overexposure—

One: the blocky rise of CNES in a three-panelled curve, row after row of boxy black windows fringed with ink-slim railings, each half-lidded in a reddening dusk. Keith stands at the foot of their grey stairs, cadet's jacket agape, arms jutting crossed and his brows crooked up, his boot one twitch short from tapping. It's as patient as he's ever looked.

Two: a downpour of cafe lights, setting aglow two tiny cake plates on platforms of blue-veined glass, a neat little pearl of a tea-table, the two dark heads craning into view. Shiro's stretched out his arm as far as he can. He's grinning with the perplexity of anyone arranging and posing for his own shot at the same time. Just under the trailing shadow of his elbow, the traitorous lens has snapped a blur that can only be Keith's fingers flicking two sugar-crusted raspberries onto Shiro's plate.

Three: Paris fallen with the tumbling night. Past the balcony, dark's veiled the stars and sketched the horizon into electric lines. City lights wink in pinprick constellations, drawing bleached edges and bone-bare shadows. The river's a distant seam of fire, arcing and splintering across a thousand windows.

Through all the silhouettes and static, only Keith seems to burn with real colour: gold in his lashes and the sway of his wrist, gold where he's propped an elbow against the wrought iron, dusk in sparks from his close, unflinching eyes. Lamplight's spilled out from the hotel room; it softens the bow of his mouth, draws a lingering flush down the line of his throat like a promise. Soon, the light suggests, he'll push himself up from the railing. With his usual shrug, he'll cross the last little distance from city to lens, shadow to light, to an intimacy just out of frame.

 _Soon, soon._ Photographs are curated like artefacts, treated as milestones and witnesses; but the reality is that lens and film together dream more than any human memory. In photograph-time, a heartbeat lingers; the light never moves. Under their ink-carved colours, there will always be all the promise in the world.

 

# *

 

A new day; a new city.

The flight to Rome goes without a hitch. The sun's sailed high into a blistered sky by the time a concierge comes plodding onto the hotel's landing pad to beckon the circling cartjumper down. Fraser barely spares them a boneless wave before he propels himself through the door, a jet-fuelled fiend to his next fateful grant proposal.

Left to freedom and open air, Shiro smoothes his hair like he could scrub the hours out. He sweeps a glance across the rooftop; predictably, Keith's already hooked his elbows over the railing, shoulders hunched like a conqueror surveying territory.

He strolls over. His hand settles between shoulder blades, and he smiles into Keith's startled look. "Not ready to start the next big marathon?"

Muscle knots under the spread of his hand, then eases. "It's not like we have any other options," Keith says—but he's looking again, sweeping over the spires and churches basking under the season's skewing brightness. "You think the jumper's got the manoeuvrability to wind between the towers? Like those."

Shiro looks. Daylight's struck across the skyline in a fine blue flame—drawn halos around spires like match-heads, white then stark as ink. Seen from on high, Rome's not so much modernity among the ruins as a fresco revealed over centuries of chiselling; the city's a conspiracy of little windows, turrets and slanting roofs and pillars made slim as stitches by the distance, all of its rich old colours simmering in the shadow of a mountain's mossy shoulder. 

"You can't take a turn on a dime's notice like that," he says at last. "You'd be burning your brakes faster than you could fix them later."

The thought grates in Keith's throat. "We should add that to the change log."

"The jumper's heading for civilian transport. I don't know if anyone's going to need the capacity to do tricks around cathedrals in daily life."

"Just because most people won't be using it doesn't mean it shouldn't be _there_."

Shiro laughs, a soft burst, and tugs his collar. "Head up, flyboy. Let's take a look at those turns up close."

Out from the hotel, the road unravels into a web of narrow backstreets. The buildings loom from every side, a vision of flushed clay and shutters mottled over decades. Inky cobblestones go ambling up and down the city's slopes, the street-names marked by battered stone plaques. Sidewalks skulk along the wider streets, flat slabs bookended with rows of shining chrome motorcycles. Stone-potted ferns spring green along the pavement; everywhere, double-doors swing in ebony and glass. 

Faced with three thousand years of mappable history, the map sputters and goes flat. There are hundreds of places to eat or gawk, and ten roads out to every pin on the map, each dashed curve more crooked and winding than the last. Any line could be a street or an alleyway. There's no telling which path's worth chasing first.

Luckily they've learned a thing or two about the art of playing tourist.

Listening, Shiro follows the noise—car horns, the cutting chimes of digital clocks branching from building-sides, snatches of violin from buskers propped up along the sidewalks—all the way out to a wider avenue. Side by side, they drop into the lazy winding of the city's weekday crowd. It's wanton waste, Shiro knows: after years of falling asleep in simulation chambers, of ratcheting up the crick in his neck over a textbook, he has time at last, and he's flinging it away by the fistful.

But this is worth it. Nothing could have prepared him for Rome. Madrid was a whirlwind, laser-shows and spice under a sultry breeze; Paris was a well-thumbed romance, all bronze shadows and living green rust, every stone and corner turned like souvenirs from a trip never taken. But Rome was the seat of an empire before it ever bent to entertaining tourists. Something of that old dignity hangs in its glassy air—like a stage between acts, breathing fountain water and relic radiation. Paint comes flaking from wan pillars and chipped, heavyset stones. The jaws of little balconies wink with lavish mosaics and touches of gilt. Here, in the thriving heart of its shopping district, there's no space on its worn-slim walkways for Madrid's bawdy open conversations, none of the tables and parasols that had overswept the sidewalks in Paris. Everything worth seeing seems to be just out of sight: peppery cheese and dark-roasted coffee beans wafting from rust-blotched doors, quiver of street names bristling with promises of historic bridges and museums on the street corners. In a flash of dizzy sun-drenched distance, monuments glint along the curving roads like props tumbled from greater hands. 

They go on together, winding into the narrower streets and out again. Alleyways reel into plazas guarded by figures of alabaster and green-bitten bronze, all of them forever caught mid-point or punch or kick. Umbrella trees fan their wide shadows over the gleaming slabs which line the sidewalks. Step by step, the winding roads slope and rise, and the city comes into view. 

What had been rays and glittering in the streets below—fringed curtains behind half-opened shutters, balconies modest as lidding eyes, cement walls laid bare in gashes—becomes a panorama. Little churches glow with the season, daylight spun soft over granite columns and polished alabaster windows. Sun spears the jutting crowns of dome after dome, dripping gold down their arches. There's a sense of weight to the view, like history run to lead in his lungs and veins. Time's passed over Rome, been spent and lost, to build these tiers and spires—each a wonder apart, but devastating together in their sheer mass, and beautiful past breathing.

Boot thuds pavement. "So," Keith says.

" _So._ "

"You know what I meant. Is this it?"

"I'm going to pretend that's not a real question," Shiro says, but grins to sweeten the sting. He nods to the horizon, and the rambling cityscape beneath. "Take a look for yourself."

"That's not what I meant." But Keith's mouth's already easing, sparked into a crooked smile. A light like a signal fire, or beacons calling strayed ships back to the harbour—but private, secret: a brightness that only ever burns between them. "They gave you notice about this trip months ago, right? You were getting tour guides shipped out from the town library for weeks."

"It was supposed to be just one book," Shiro says, in a last sad grab for dignity. He scrubs the nape of his neck; his skin prickles with the glaring day. "And I really wasn't expecting this much free time."

"That doesn't mean you don't still have a list of things to check out." He folds his arms, stubborn conviction bound up in Garrison gold. "Shiro, come on."

 _Caught._ Shiro clasps a shoulder, rolls it in a wry, loosening turn. "Well—I know there's a slope just outside the city, where they say the gravity's reversed, and anything you drop rolls uphill. They also have the ruins where Caesar was murdered—it shouldn't be too far from here, and apparently it's been into a cat sanctuary... Then there's the Capuchin crypts, where they've decorated the walls with old bones. There's a crypt lined with nothing but pelvic skeletons."

"Pelvic skeletons."

"You're giving that a lot of thought," he says, studying Keith's bristling elbows. "If it helps, I know for a fact that you have one of your own."

"I'm just thinking. If you take a picture in there, and you send it to someone, does that count as a dick pic?"

Shiro raises both brows. "My guess is, it depends on the context. Got someone specific in mind?"

Their gazes catch, and hold. "Not anymore," Keith says.

"I feel like I'm hearing some insubordination, cadet."

"I had pre-existing permission, _sir_."

Their grins flash up together in linked lights. Brightness to brightness, so strong that Shiro nearly shivers with it. In theory, if he thinks back, he could remember a time before this—years before this easy trust, this language forged under a system of artificial honours and formalities, this tug in his pulse to hold on for as long as he can.

But Keith's still looking at him.

"You're not wrong," Shiro says. "About the list. But Rome's too big to think through where we're heading by myself. I need some kind of prompt, or we'll probably wind up on a quest for the biggest meatball in Italy."

Keith weighs the thought as he always does. His fists sway; his shoulders stretch like wire. "Nothing that's just a monument," he says at last.

"That," Shiro says, "might narrow it down _too_ much. Most things tend to have a little history behind them around here."

"I don't care if they have _history_. I mean—stuff like big rocks. Or ruins so old that you can't even see any of the things that made them important anymore. Places that're only important because things happened around them."

The light's shifted between them; the linked moment's gone. "Any reason I should know about?" Shiro says.

"Not really."

But Keith's pinched his mouth thin; his jaw's cinching as if to bite back a flood. Shiro knows that look: the narrow, downturned glare, the bolted line of his back. 

He waits.

"I don't get them," Keith says at last. 

"What about them?"

"Anything." The words drag through his teeth—slow, crawling-slow, spinning like dust through the metallic heat. "Why people still go looking for them—why anyone _cares_. We already got everything we needed from them—that's why they're open to the public. Monuments won't tell us anything about science or the future or even history. People think monuments're important because they survived. It doesn't make sense. Most of the ones we look at aren't even whole anymore. No one's ever built a monument just because they were proud of something they made. They did it because they're scared that other people might forget what they did—might forget _them_ before they're ready. 

And it doesn't even work. No one goes to look at monuments because they care about the people who built them. They go so that they can celebrate themselves—because they know they're lucky to have made it there after the original creators're long gone. By the time it's a real monument, it's just the _thing_ that matters. Because that's all that's left. "

It's a tumult of a speech, a trickle that cracks into a flood. Halfway through, Shiro finds his fingers knotting up, grinding back the impulse to smooth the arch of Keith's spine, as if contact could sap away the grit and fury beneath his skin.

Instead: he shifts on his heels. Stays in place. "We're talking about things standing centuries after their creators died, Keith."

"So what?"

"So," Shiro says, measuring the word. "A lot of people came together and built these things to last. And they have. We may not always remember their names. But don't you think it'd be worth something to them, having their work remembered like that?"

Out of the gauzy sunlight, Keith slings him a night-stark look. "If _you_ had to choose," he says.

Shiro breathes.

This is not the kind of conversation he has with Keith, where every word passes like a chisel from hand to hand, working together to bring an ideal out of stone and into shape. There's a double-vision here: the stone is granite and dust; the ideal is belief and dream half-sanded away. They're talking about monuments, and then again they aren't, and the foundation under everything they're saying carries a gravity that he's never measured, only felt and answered. A history they've always orbited without words, steering around its pull, never once thinking to land.

He thinks he might understand. A curator looks at a monument and sees the roots of seven architectural styles, evidence for particular cultural traditions in history, a trophy for archaeological triumphs past and future. A native looks at a monument and sees a fixed point; no matter how they might transform, what disasters might come, the tests they might fail or overcome—always, their roots will always back to this stretch of road, these towering stones.

A boy looks at a monument and sees something torn apart by time, left behind—and still, still waiting.

"I don't," Shiro says. It's the only answer he knows. "I don't want to think about it like that."

Keith's head jerks, once and again. He jolts forward a step, then another, until he's braced against the railing. "Right," he tells the tumbling air. "I get that. But it's the only way I _can_ think about it."

Shiro looks at him—but Keith's watching those faraway towers. Daylight's plunged the sky into a raw blue like an ache behind the eyes, deep as sea-light. He stares through the burn of it, unfaltering.

"After I'm gone," Keith says, almost to himself. "I hope everyone forgets me."

 

# *

 

By luck or sheer crow-dark cunning, Fraser catches them as they stumble into the hotel foyer at dusk. With blithe authority, he glosses over their dusty trousers, their flush and summer-drenched sweat and dead eyes, and commandeers them as his guests to dinner with the board.

He must have impressed someone at the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana: what had been inked down as a grant proposal has splashed out into a sharp little conference. They're hauled into one of the hotel's ballrooms and left stranded in a sea of plush red chairs spinning around delicate tea-tables, knee-high and fine-boned ebony. Given what the entire Garrison knows about Fraser's tastes, the space is surprisingly close: chandeliers swaying overhead with a bare fistful of shards to each; the window's arches touched with winks and flurries of gilt; a long buffet steaming under the cream-pale flowers cut across the stone relief. After a day's wild wandering, it's almost comforting to be standing under all this pomp and plaster flash, plucking at the silverware, shadowed by the curtain rods worked into sunstruck wings while scientists mumble their way towards dinner. No stirrings of history here—only snips of garlic and fried eel.

The privileges of tourism.

"Shirogane! You have lost our prodigy, I see."

He turns just in time to find Fraser bearing down on him, broad shoulders and a rattail that seems to be materialising a rat after the fact: after days of pleading for funding, Fraser's frizzing into hollow-eyed fervour. His elbows jolt and his steps swerve into wild, jagged strides across the carpet: the picture of a man with an itch to fix something. 

By reflex, Shiro's gaze jumps down in search of a coffee cup to confiscate. "Keith's just checking out the buffet," he says, which has the advantage of being mostly true. From the line, Keith'll also have a chance to spot and prepare for Fraser before he finds his way back. "You can sit down with us at dinner, if there's something you need to discuss." 

Fraser waves this away. "As if I did not see his face when he came through those magnificent doors. Hear me, Shirogane—had I known he would have such a reaction to fine food and good company, I would not have invited you. Your seats were in high demand, you know! And to what end did I give them? _Pfuit_. Wasted. No, the cadet will have no more of my prime networking hours."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Shiro says, gravely. "And I'm sure Keith will be, too."

"Ah—" another wave like a one-winged swoop "—you know I mean no insult to your protégé. He is a top-notch pilot. And he will not be so terrible-looking once he ceases to look as if somebody is constantly waving rotten cheese under his nose."

Shiro stares at his left ear. "I can honestly say that I don't think anyone else would describe his face that way. You just have to get to know him a little."

Hands clap onto his shoulders. Shiro startles, but too late: Fraser's knitting-needle bones grip like vices. "Get to know him? Shirogane," the instructor says, with the tragic emphasis of a man who's inhaled his body weight in caffeine. "He is a would-be government recruitee who cannot pass through a _metal detector_. I have hardly ever seen him except in the simulation rooms. And even now—I have been on this vacation with you and the cadet for how many days? Yet all that I have ever seen of him is that unarrestable frown. He frowns at the chocolate biscuits at breakfast. He frowns at the most beautiful view from our hotel—a view for which he is not even having to pay! Some few days ago, when he was waiting for you in the lobby, we saw the worst tourist in all the world. A stupid little man kept throwing out crumbs on the sidewalk until a great mob of pigeons sank down upon him like an evil cloud. Yet did our ingenious cadet laugh at this fool with a face full of feathers and justified rage? No, he looked like a sinner staring into yet another plate of biscuits!"

It's a good speech, full of sound and fury, and delivered in a really remarkable accent for a man whose personnel file lists his birthplace as Trenton, New Jersey, USA. "That sounds like Keith," Shiro says, placid, and reaches up to pry off one hand. "He really cares about other people's suffering."

Fraser's thin-sketched brows jab into a glower. He tugs, undeterred, and peers into Shiro's face. "Do you play cards, Shirogane?"

"Not professionally."

"A shame. You would have some trouble coaxing him into the appropriate dress, and it is certain that he lacks the _vision_ for a greater challenge. But the payoff for the two of you could be handsome indeed."

His grip locks. He smiles, a spotlight pinned over Fraser's slack mouth and hazy pupils. "That's a nice thing to say," Shiro says. "But it's not necessary. You're misreading Keith. A lot of people do that. But I get the feeling it wouldn't be the biggest help when it comes to gambling."

Fraser flicks his plucked brows in the sardonic, prickling air common to Garrison instructors. With his free hand, he claps Shiro's shoulder once more and shifts back. "Bah. Perhaps. If you say that he has his own appeal, then I must believe you. But I myself do not see it."

"You don't have to."

"You are very on edge this trip, yourself. It may be that this vacation was well-timed for all of us."

 _On edge._ It's true, and it isn't—but he lets it go. "You know," Shiro tells him, a little wry, "this wasn't really supposed to _be_ a vacation."

"Shirogane," Fraser says again with curling grand pity. "Listen to me. You did not come to me without vetting. You know this? I had the unique opportunity, myself, to review your file with your supervisor. You have been at the Garrison for three years after graduation without a single break to your name. Have you never heard of career fatigue? Is there any glory in the universe that would not grant you a few weeks of relief before you go sailing out to find it?"

It's a rhetorical question. But he knows, all the same. Less than a hundred-trillionth of the universe is matter, a number so far-flung from human experience that it might as well translate to infinity. He carries its string of unconverted zeroes in the links of his spine—dreamed each digit as white shrapnel tumbling towards the stars. 

There's no name for a record nobody's claimed yet. Soon, that won't be an issue.

"I didn't choose to fly for the Garrison as a career," Shiro says. "Most days, there's nowhere I'd rather be."

"Most days?"

"Well," he says, slower. "There's an exception to everything."

A question stiffens Fraser's tongue, stinging pink between his teeth. But the room's murmuring washes back around them. Fraser's gaze sweeps past his shoulder; light curves along his pupils like a little flame.

Shiro turns.

Somewhere during the tangled, wandering conversation, Keith tore himself loose from the mess of scavengers attacking the buffet. He's stopped just on the brink of the dining floor with a painted plate, balancing a two steaks and a huge loaf with round corners like a very small hat. 

They look up together, two heads called to the same signal. Across a flood of tables, Keith's stare settles on him; his half-frown melts into a warmer thought, dark brows easing and his lips a little parted as Shiro looks back to him. 

But Keith rolls a shoulder. His mouth curves; his lashes drop with a laugh's bright quirk—and then he's turning away, beating a shameless retreat while Shiro stares at his back, still netted in Fraser's inexhaustible thirst for small talk.

Keith, Shiro thinks, has a lot of underestimated good points. Clearly his instinct about people worth saving from grim social ambushes isn't one of them.

But when he turns again, Fraser's eyes have settled on him, too—steadier, rueful, all his restless guttering burned into mirth.

"Ah," Fraser sighs. He's smiling for no reason that Shiro can understand. "Perhaps I do see the appeal."

 

# *

 

Despite their splendid welcome, the ASI moves with caution. Their scheduled two-day stay spins into three, then four. Fraser's glassy confidence crumbles with every morning report to the Garrison; his passing greetings in the hallways devolve into vague snarls about _more tests_. On the fifth morning, he tears his way down from his suite and promptly tumbles into fits at finding his jet-lagged pilots still collapsed in the lobby.

"It is a glorious day, you have all of Italy to wander, and you stay _indoors_? In Rome?" His gaze burns in rays of horror, the portrait and dramatic framing of a man drained to the dregs by grant-grubbing, left with only vicarious lives to live. He shoos them out from the gilded revolving doors and into the street—stands on the freckled granite steps to howl encouragements at their backs as they hurry away. "Go! Buy a train ticket—buy _two_ , even! Be young and glorious somewhere! _Try to kiss something as beautiful as I am!_ "

Keith's still swiping glares down the road as they wrench themselves up the cobblestone slope, in a way that's spelling disaster for Fraser's odds for riding back to the Garrison in the cartjumper. Shiro keeps an eye on the street, his hand on Keith's back, bracing him. They duck into an alcove as a sputtering old two-door grunts onto the sidewalk and goes grinding around the crooked parking of a curvy wide convertible.

Nothing that they haven't seen, by now. 

"Not to validate volume before eight in the morning—but he might be onto something," Shiro says, and crushes his grin as Keith swings up into a frown. His hair's still in tufts, gold-laced in the filtering morning; his glower's burned down to a bleary simmer. "Come on. He's probably still standing guard back there. We might as well check out the ticket prices."

"Ugh," says Keith. His fist holds fast to Shiro's shoulder all the way up the sidewalk.

 

# *

 

 _Two-and-a-half hours_ , the departure placards promise—but mostly what Shiro will remember about the ride up to the ferry's a wash of green countryside: daisies swaying red and violet, powdering clouds across the staring green clearings.

The railroad's been mapped and remapped over decades. The latest route snakes over tilled fields and pine-cool trees, clustered close enough to whisper with the racing breeze. Tucked in the lush high shelves of a rounded hill, faraway houses hold their gleaming walls like battlements. Hour after hour, the slopes rise and fall; the train windows snap with reels of fairy-tales—here, the tumble and rise of a deep-cut valley, furred with shadowed forests; there, a cluster of clay-baked houses edged up against a cliff, headed by a single spire capped with a crown.

He'll remember this, but Keith won't. Keith'd tumbled into his seat as soon as they'd boarded. For the past hour, he's been slouched onto the curving windowsill, mouth pressed into the crook of his elbow, wrist bent over his head like a new wing. Taking his rest where he can, with a thief's wary quickness.

The compartment's warming with slices of summer light. Shiro undoes the first button of his jacket, then the next. He presses a hand into the dark curve of Keith's hair. At once, Keith starts up, all drowsy-lidded blinking. "What—"

"Don't," Shiro says, regretful even as he slips the jacket off. "Hey, don't worry—you're all right, Keith. Keep sleeping. I've got you."

He eases Keith back against the seat cushions as Keith's eyes darken and lid. There's no resistance in his weight. Shiro palms and tugs, and he curls into the pull, bowed under the dusty weight of exhaust and trust. Around Keith's shoulders goes the jacket, sleeves trailing loose as smoke; he drapes them clumsily over Keith's elbows. The cabin's air-conditioning's a weak snap in the air, but there's a comfort in this: smoothing down the collar beneath his jaw, trailing echoes back to a pearled morning in Paris.

 _Acts of caring, acts of protection._ He'd thought of it then, half-dreaming. The riddle sits on his tongue like a stone. In a way, there's never been a difference. Intimacies are things learned more than they are invented—the blind feeling out their separate boundaries, building bridges over each. Over time, they've learned each other: that Keith's first to bristle under a cold night, a desert boy to his bones; that Shiro has a guilty fondness for the way Keith looks, wrapped in a pilot's grey and gold. One has a habit of reaching out in greeting, as emphasis, in a crowd, thinking of nothing but being warm; one holds on a little too tight when their fingers lace, never first to let go. It's getting harder to remember which of them does which.

Seven days gone. Soon, he'll have to start counting by the hours. The minutes. 

Soon, but not yet.

Ahead, Venice hangs in wait under the fleeting light.

 

# *

 

Photograph: an empty day. Sunlight's boiled into a haze across the long grasses. Ahead, the skeletal rail's sketched a road over the empty fields. The roadsides prickle with thin hedges, slicing the countryside to slivers. Secret dusty paths wind through the rushes and out to the drowsing mountains—but these are glimpsed then lost in a passing snap.

At the very edge of the hollowed sapphire sky, a thumb smears a straying cloud.

 

# *

 

They climb off their third ferry an hour off-schedule, with the countryside sun still thrumming in their bones. Afternoon's veiled the island; under its lamp-thin light, the winds reek of salt, canalwater, and old wood. The shouts of gondoliers shrill like gulls across the way as their steps go bumping up the grey ramp.

Shiro comes up short as Keith stops in the mouth of the first open lane. His mouth purses on a half-question; his arms knot, and he slouches against a rosy wall, head bent as if to track some sound. "It's quiet," he says.

On cue, the gull-cries rise: three gondoliers are jostling down the nearby canal, their sleek painted skiffs side by side under a spindle-legged bridge, locking up the bottle-green waters to bawl each other out. But Keith's not wrong. There's an undercurrent beneath all their burbling and booming: city streets lying in a hush, stripped of the grinding roar of car engines. No matter how he listens, there's only the rush of water and a faraway crowd. 

"Too quiet?" Shiro says. "We could take the ferry back to the train."

"I thought you wanted to see the city."

Shiro laughs, a husky drop into a maze murmuring with water. "I wanted to go somewhere. It doesn't have to be the same thing."

"Maybe. But we're here already."

"That's fair," Shiro says. "All right—we'll walk around and see what we find. Anything off-limits today?"

"Still no museums or monuments. Not unless you really want to. And," Keith says, with a dark look at the canal, "no swimming."

Shiro sketches a quick-fingered cross under his collarbones. "It's a promise," he says.

They drift into the city on foot, lumbering across bridges like little brick tides, turning now and then from gates barred with iron spears. Daylight filters down as if through glass. Having been to Rome, it's impossible not to recognise her sister: the street names on chipped stone placards, the rusted bars and curlicues which cage their windows, houses drenched in sun colours with blackbirds tapping across the sills. But the decades which only visited Rome have settled on Venice in waves. Across the canal, there's a single house painted white over again; its scorched rooftiles wink with new fire under a lash of sunlight. For every tended building, there's ten coming undone: shutters peeling like birch; dark, squared windows staring out from cracked frames; walls where grey continents of cement slough away from the fading brick. All along the water and mazy streets, buildings stand shoulder to shoulder, gleaming with loose-nailed boards and crumbling graffiti. Like a museum of losses pinned and preserved, kept just on the cusp of life.

It's strange. He'd seen the islands mapped on screens, flecks across a murky lagoon. But the streets keeps unfolding in turn after ceaseless turn. Down its slate walkways, there's an open-air market, idling under white canopies with apples and popcorn and pitted palm dates wafting honey. There are hat-makers; there are convenience stores selling everything from disposable phones to socks and hand-painted postcards; there are cramped little shops where silk-stitched carnival masks leer and weep and hold haunted court along the shelves. 

If ever a city was made for wandering, it must have been Venice. 

With a tourist's recklessness, Shiro keeps his phone tucked away. Together they cross bridges, knocking out a metal thrum from the railings as they go. They stumble into courtyards lined with round, barred windows and curving pillars, and out again. The sky bursts into dusty gold. Avenues wane into narrow steps and maze-high walls, crusted with red and white stucco. 

They stop almost by coincidence. It's a crooked lane of shops that they wend into, barely more than a seam in the earth, littered with lost flyers. A few shop shutters have already been slung down; petal by petal, the flowers are folding in their clay-warm windowboxes. Wires sway from slate roofs rounded by long nights whispering to the salt winds. But there's a thin glow trailing across a last black-boned bridge, just around the corner.

One after another, they duck under a clothesline strung across the lane, leaving the pyjamas and faded t-shirts to whip like flags in their wake. The light turns out to be the spill of an iron lantern, winking as it hangs from an alder tree branch. In the tree's shadow, there's a plastic table nearly sagging under a sea of prints, famous paintings washing one over the other in a glossy tide. There's no price tag or sign attached.

Shiro glances up—but Keith's forged ahead. He's stooping over a wheelbarrow squatting in the middle of the path: unmanned, heaped high with books, going nowhere.

"What," he says.

There's no choice after that. They go through, through, through: past an iron door scratched with Latin, the wall lettered "FOLLOW THE BOOKS STEPS CLIMB" in fresh chalk, down to an alleyway crackling high on either side with heaps of raggedy hardcovers. At the alley's end, there squats a door under a bronze shield, behind a gleaming cherrywood threshold.

"Huh," Shiro says.

Well, it's an adventure.

The bookshop's no tidier than the props that it'd left outside. Everything that might conceivably hold a book seems to have been crammed into the low space. They pass shelves and cabinets, bowing to a sloped ceiling patched with smears of plaster. Bathtubs bump up against each other like boats; shelves rise from their porcelain in rows of rickety bamboo and battered office steel. There's even a repurposed gondola, gilt still flaking off its old stripe: textbooks and diaries heap along its floor, stickered with discounts.

They lose each other between STORIA DEL MONDO and FANTASCIENZA. It's Keith who finds him first, wedged onto a stool between shelves, book in hand and a grey cat winding deliberately between the stool's leg and Shiro's. "I should have said no zoos," Keith says.

"Sorry. Guess I forgot to turn off my animal magnetism today."

Keith narrows his eyes. "Here," he says, and drops a book into his lap. Fumbling, Shiro barely snags it; he turns its spine up to the light as the cat yowls under all his jostling. "He says that it's theoretically possible to make a wormhole on Earth with just an ice cube and a pressure cooker. Did you know about that?"

 _He_ turns out to be Michio Kaku, his wisdom pinned into a glossy heavybound volume—now fatter still with new remarks for its fiftieth anniversary. Shiro presses the book apart with careful hands. He thumbs through the first chapters, flurrying past diagrams and scrawled formulas. The smile he'd crushed down at the docks blooms again. "You think we missed out by not going to the Garrison's science division? Wormholes would explain all those generators they keep building in the labs."

"The science division isn't going to pilot the longest manned mission out from Earth."

In timeless Venice, a beat skips. "Nice to hear that," Shiro says. "Unfortunately, I'm getting the feeling that I might have to live out the rest of my life on this stool."

Together they stare at the cat, returned with a vengeance and wound herself into a tangle over Shiro's boot. "Go away," Keith tells her. "He's a dog person."

The cat lifts her wispy head, all dour green-eyed insolence, to hold Keith's stare. Her ears ease back; her featherduster tail twitches across the floorboards. A cloudy leg settles over Shiro's boot and locks there like a shackle, vibrating and warm.

"As a general life tip," Shiro says. "It's usually not a good idea to tell _any_ cat that they can't win you over."

"You have to stop hanging out with strays," says Keith, king of unexamined ironies. He steps forward, and nearly trips as the weaving tail lashes out. "What's it doing?"

"On a guess—claiming her territory. If you've got food in your pockets, we might have to try negotiating the hard way."

"Shiro," Keith says, cross and dark.

"What?"

"You're the one who's good with animals."

"And if I'm remembering right, you're the one who beat my score in evasive manoeuvres."

Keith stares. A hand knuckles at his side and slackens again, left in an unsettled pendulum swing. "If you want to stay, we'll stay," he says at last. "But I'm going to get another book."

There's an answer to that, one more shot in the endless sure-fire exchanges that strike up so easily between them. But Shiro palms down the stool's gloss and studies the floor. "No," he says. "Wait. Let me see what I can do."

He leans up to the closest bookshelf, braces along its supporting bathtub while a hand cranes down its spidery steel row. At last, he plucks out a thin volume: ragged yellowleaf, _Walt Whitman_ etched down its skeletal spine. He sifts through the pages, murmuring through glimpses of atoms, fathers and sons, some faraway stretch of yellowing grasses—

> " _A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest,  
>  There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word._ "

"What are you doing?"

Past the page, there's Keith—dark-eyed, weighing back on a heel, fingers hooked over his own shoulder. Neither silent in his approach nor inclined to stretch out his hand. Nothing like Whitman's dreamers, longing and lingering, flushed with the wealth of their own atoms. Still. "Whatever I can," Shiro says at his most solemn—but that gives way to shameless opportunity. "I figured this would be the fastest way. Once she sees that we're not doing anything interesting, she'll probably get bored and wander off."

Keith hunches. He bites down one answer, and another; his eyes rake down the page, gathering ink and suspicion. "Is that poetry?"

"Sit on the bathtub," Shiro says. "This one's actually pretty good. We could be here for a while."

 

# *

 

It's afternoon still when the cat lets them go, but only just. 

They drift out, across bridges rippling with light. At the gondola docks they stop again, squinting over the line of crescent boats to the towers and faceted domes stitched across the horizon. Shiro breathes in, tasting salt and old stone. In the half-light, it's easy to feel the way they're standing on the cusp of everything: the end of a season; the spectrum of Venice's mornings and twilights, sliding from rose and gold to shadow; this slice of land, held like hope between saltwater and sky.

Their ferry dock lies north, half an hour no matter whether they go by foot or by boat. Shiro pinches his wallet, guilty. He nods once. Onward, he means—so they go.

The quay opens into a grey plaza thronged with carved white buildings. Statues loom along their pillared edges, each in a new pose: heels cocked, cringing, stooped in stone-eyed admiration. Across the square, a cat-like beast fumes alone at the top of a looming column. The Lion of Venice, Shiro remembers as they cross—but surely no lion's ever looked like that: wings furled and loose-tailed, back arched in a pale green longing to fly.

They follow the stripes, crossing through a loose herd of chairs, and sellers hawking t-shirts from metal caravans strung with trinkets. It's one thing to be told that Venice is the island of a thousand churches—another to see dome after dome clipped with square crosses, the spires gleaming like red candlesticks, faded clocktowers standing guard against time. An older cathedral rises from every new corner, mottled marble and lattices shining pale as old bone. Couples tug one another forward, hand in hand. Coils of tourists stop between the pillars, snapping a palace's jutting white crown against the smoky sky.

Every step seems to lure them into some lost wonder rediscovered and made new again. Nothing that's found its way across the waters has ever disappeared—only kept, caged, waiting for the right moment to light its display again.

Out of nowhere, Keith snags his arm, jerking him back. 

A woman's rooted before them, her back turned and her dark head craning up, up to the swell of light spangling the blue-stained astronomical clock. Her prickling braids quiver as she knuckles at her eye—and then she's clutching herself, elbows and shoulders jolting sharp, crying while the day unravels around her. 

"Thanks," Shiro hears himself say. 

He steers Keith away. Tower-bells sing out in scattered chorus, startling the dusk. The chimes mingle with the woman's voice, weaving through it something of each bell's deep echo, until their sounds rise in chorus, hoarse and wondering—the joyful sobbing of a body under the weight of a miracle.

"Does it mean that much?"

The question comes a few steps after. True to the unspoken order, Keith isn't looking back—but his spine's tensed under the spread of Shiro's fingers, caught in the swing of another world.

"It depends on where you're coming from," Shiro says. It takes him a moment. "I've never really—thought about art that much. But some of the buildings date from centuries back. Their government spent a lot on terraforming efforts over decades to keep the island from sinking. Right now, the city still looks exactly how it did about a hundred years ago, all because they convinced the world that the art and landmarks here had to be preserved. That's worth seeing."

"Worth seeing," Keith says, "because they mattered to other people at some point."

"Not exactly. I'm not really sure how to explain it. It's just—history."

"History's everywhere. You're always standing in some of it, no matter where you go. That's how time works."

"Not according to Greene's theory of the space-time loaf," Shiro says. He bumps their shoulders, grinning and easy, as Keith swaps exasperated looks with a statue. "But that's not what I mean by history. People came together to make this city, and they came back to save it again and again over generations. We might not remember everything the original creators wanted us to remember anymore—but we still honour them. They made something that went beyond one person's expressions and beliefs. Something so beautiful that it connected whole countries down the centuries. I don't know what they mean as far as art goes. But connecting's worth something, to me."

He turns. Keith's stopped steps back, eyes darkening in the sweep of a cathedral's shadow, colour struck across his cheekbones. It's a look that he knows and doesn't: an answer, a promise, a fever like a fire, like flaying, just waiting to catch on skin.

"Something wrong?" Shiro says.

"Come on," Keith says, and heads for the closest archway.

Neither of them stop on the threshold, but it's a close thing. 

An architect had stood on these grounds once, worked a dream of gold and relentless splendour into shape. After centuries, the effect's no less staggering. The church is a double-vision: house and jewellery-box, sanctuary and offering, ruin and fantasy. Colours leap from the vaulted hollows, bronze and pearl and glass-green embroidered across every byzantine arch. The walls are a frenzy of friezes; jewelled mosaics stretch along the long pillars, bearing up the second floor. Here bows a procession of haloed figures in a green meadow; there, in the curving niche above a black window, spins a reel of faces ringed in gold-leaf. Even the dust goes brilliant in the church's kindling air, tumbling with the last red rays through the black-barred glass.

A breath flickers in his throat: once, twice, before it gutters out. Speaking doesn't feel quite right in a space that's been hollowed out, century after century, to hold the living silence of a thousand years in prayer.

Keith skulks back from a constellated pillar. He nudges arm against arm, and Shiro laughs, quiet and quick. It is, for a moment, the only sound he can make. "So?" he says.

"So," says Keith.

"Don't make me put the full question together. I'd feel like an art teacher."

"I've seen your sweater collection. You wouldn't have had a chance in art school." Somewhere under their murmuring, they've fallen into step, trailing the storm of shoes wandering through the glossy hush. Now Keith shrugs, modern insouciance framed in old, old glory. "I don't know. It's fine, I guess—at least the door didn't burst into flames when I walked through."

"Churches don't have that kind of radar," Shiro says, low and fond in spite of himself. "You're thinking of metal detectors."

"It's not like I've been setting metal detectors on fire either," Keith says under his breath. "Yet."

They lapse into silence after that, winding their way between the once-red pillars, now blackened with prayers and centuries. The deeper chamber's no less ornate—every corner jewelled, wrung and wrought into glory—but there's something more human in its air. Dropped paper scraps, the scent of beeswax and salt. Candles burn in dusty white tapers along the pews. The little flames cast stars across the jasper and basalt panels, spark new life where the once-molten paintings have cooled into old roses and faded silk. Some careless hand's left the altar strewn with props from a leftover ritual: muslin flowers, sheet music, burnished frames perching like goldfinches. It's almost jarring to see them—the simple, ordinary parts of religion laid out in all this untouchable glory.

Their steps fall without prayer or art; their separate gazes follow only a clean, severing intent to see everything they can.

"Back at the Garrison," Keith says—first, as always. "You were reading about Europe for months. How many days did you spend on Venice?"

Shiro glances at him. "Just a few," he says.

Keith's stare is a fuming, coal-dim light. He jerks his chin up to a hollow splendid and shining with saints. "Fine. Tell me about that."

 _Tell me._ The words jar him, and then he's out of step, out of frame. For a moment, for no reason at all, they're caught in separate shots: Keith in a gold-wrought basilica, frowning and focused, and Shiro under an urge so sharp that it guts him like muscle memory. 

He knows Keith, is the thing: his outbursts, his clenched private grief, the way he always cuts to the heart of things with a line and a knifepoint silence. Under all the turning constellations, Keith's held steady: a conspiracist, a star-chaser, ruthless with the things that he doesn't want, unyielding and alone. He doesn't waste time on beauty. A boy with a single lesson cut into fibre and bone: that he will always be the last, the lost, the one left remembering and left behind. 

_I don't know what they mean as far as art goes,_ Shiro had told him outside the church. _But connecting's worth something, to me._

And so. Here they are in a sea of candles, separate and together. Here Keith is—trying, in spite of everything he knows and all the days to come.

Here, here, here. But silence suspends time, and space is a negotiated probability between particles. Distance is relative, location is a passing coincidence and a human invention—and yet. Here the basilica's stood for a thousand years. A touch is nothing to that. There'd be no shift in planet or stars if he brushed the hair from Keith's forehead—if he smoothed a fingertip between his frowning brows, pressed a thumb along his lip. Connection prolonged by one heartbeat more, that's all. A single point of warmth to carry out with him from all this dust and light.

But the candleflames sway, and Keith lifts his eyes. Time's filmreel slips back into place.

Shiro touches his nape; his fingers knot as he cants his head. "Well," he says. "That looks like a pretty ordinary candlestick. But let me look up the painting behind it."

In shadow, his pulse beats on. Keeping time. Racing it. 

He can't. He can't.

 

# *

 

Snapshot, torn from a tourist's instant camera: a boy on the edge of a fountain's stone landing. His boots have been punted off, his trousers rolled up but still dripping. Cups and takeout cardboard sprawl around him: rice glinting black as ink, little fried crabs dusty with breadcrumbs, biscuits fanned behind clear plastic alongside two cups of glossy dipping cream. 

His brows have pinched. A tiny red spoon's sticking out of his mouth. He stares up into the lens with sour dismay.

 

# *

 

They leave Italy before dusk on the sixth day, packed and herded to go in a tumbling fury that seems on-par with the rest of Fraser's record. After their drawn-out negotiations and aimless wandering days, Prague seems to come all at once, too soon. From the cartjumper, it's a speck between the dappled trees, then a shadow, the crest of a wave—racing up through its own dense forests and milky clouds to break, at last, into a tessellation turned mountain range, towers and coils of red-shingled roofs under a cold sunset.

Grip steady, turn-and-slip indicator twitching, Shiro thinks of shouting over the engine for a picture. But this isn't the part that he'll want to remember.

At the landing, the Prague division's already strewn across the rooftop, a row of decaffeinated glowers hastily stuffed into trim black suits. 

But Shiro's learned his lesson. He clasps Keith's wrist, tugs him into silence as the suits run through the gamut of introductions. He lets the Prague representatives shuffle their group into the obligatory tour: mazy cubicles shielded in red and green; the boxy stairwell inexplicably emblazoned with SWEET DREAMS ARE MADE OF THIS... in knifing silver; a lab space sprawling beneath a tapered white ceiling, its light-lined shelves and tables glowing like holograms. Every inch arranged for the public's eye, and not a word about patent valuation in earshot. 

Unshaven, his rattail layered with more grease than hair, Fraser loses patience by the third floor. A clearance card is printed for the agency's guest of honour. The uncleared pilots are deposited in the grey foyer with a brusque wave and a quick jotting of their hotel address. 

Freedom's an easy shot from there. One note to Fraser, scrawled under the eye of the unimpressed and underpaid secretary, and they're out and gone.

They don't talk about where they're going. They don't have to. Downtown Prague's a modern city, easy walkways winding around chrome and imported marble, its lamps like coloured baubles, its restaurant awnings printed in jutting fonts. They wander at first as they had in brighter cities. It's strange, after thriving, feverish Madrid and Venice's self-conscious romance, to see KITCHEN RAMEN BAR and MEAT & GREET slouching across from hand-chalked menus spiky with consonants. Boutiques and banks tuck up next to each other under crowns of carved fans and ferns, and wide glass buildings heft up their names in gaudy neon letters, each so sharp as to etch their shapes through the darkening sky. 

The shape of it comes together into a city he almost knows. Shiro's seen streets as wide as these before. He's heard these sulky grunts steaming up from a weekday crowd, watched boots and sneakers like these stamping down stripes of new-minted brick. The cars churn along the pedestrian walkways, and sometimes onto them too, drivers grittily conscious that there's no time to spare—that there never has been.

_Three days left._

At a certain point, freedom becomes reason. They can wander, so they do. Block after block, they go on, chasing a strangeness not quite in focus. The streams of shops and steel-framed windows give way to churches and repainted parapets, turrets with crisp new shingles. Saints fling out their granite blessings from behind grainy pillars. A hotel dressed in rosy stucco preens by a starry walkway; its windows burn under a leaden dome. Street after street falls behind them. The river opens up before them, a mirror-fine sprawl on the brink of breathless colour. 

It's Prague, still, across the bridge. The maps tell them that much. But its medieval rises glint like the reflections from an older century, ghostly lights between the geometry of sloping roofs and castle-like crenellations. 

They hurry past martyrs and crosses cut into bronze relief. Stars prickle out through the dusk, glinting then lost under the river-mists. Kind of a waste, Shiro thinks, regretful: all this bright design out of sight of the sky.

"How many of those are there?"

The words ring out. Keith's still craning after the last statue, a fading silhouette of robes and supplicating hands, like it might spring after them as soon as he turns his back. Several of the shapes along the bridge have that look: mute and metal and watchful with bile, like sleepers waiting for one more chance.

"At this point, I hope they aren't keeping count." But Shiro cocks a brow. "So I'm guessing—no statues this time?"

"Most of what they've got here's statues," Keith says, dry through the low fog. "If you really want to go somewhere, though—there's a couple that sounded like they'd still work for pictures at night."

" _Sounded_ ," Shiro echoes. His heartbeat clutches at the word, reframes it. "Were you looking things up on the ride over for me?"

"One of them's a statue of a horse," says Keith, master of interrogations. His flyaway hair flicks with the darkening breeze; his fists knot in the lining of his jacket-pockets. "It's hanging upside-down, and there's a guy sitting on its stomach. I think it's supposed to be pretty famous."

"You're sure it was a horse."

"If it's not, someone was really confused when they wrote up the plaque. They also have this famous tower with babies crawling up and down the sides. At night, every floor's supposed to light up with different colours."

Another post flashes by, stripped light illuminating some figure brandishing either a sceptre or a hook. In a certain slant of darkness, everything looks like an urban legend waiting to happen.

"Not that I'm not flattered by the research you did for me," Shiro says. "But I'm getting a little concerned about your parameters for cultural significance, buddy."

"It's famous. How's that _not_ culturally significant?"

"That depends on the next point on your list."

"Well," Keith says, very level. "There's this fountain. Someone put two statues standing face to face, with their pants open and a sign with a number you can text. A couple sites say that if you use your phone to write them a message, the statues'll move and spell it out in the water with their p—"

"Is there a probable universe where you don't finish that sentence?"

Keith ducks his head, and Shiro feels the transformation in the air: cobblestones scraping with their shuffled steps; night to carbon dioxide, overheated, dizzying; the slow glinting break of Keith's smile just on the brink of sight. "At your order," he says, " _sir_."

Heroically, he resists the urge to scrub at Keith's hair until the inevitable tussle knocks them into a lamp-post. "All right," Shiro sighs. "I had that one coming. Come on—we only have a few days left. Fraser can't schedule us here for that long." 

_Three days._ Echo spins into echo, scraping a new hollow beneath his ribs. Onward they go in rasping steps. His fingers itch for a brake, a steering wheel. Anything to steer through the shallow burn of restlessness in every limb. 

"If you could choose to do anything," Shiro says. "What would you want? Don't think about what other people've wanted to see. No art. No famous restaurants. No Garrison-approved educational tours. Just—something we can do. Together."

The river simmers against the horizon, violet and red flaring past a drift of clouds. Dusk's flowering in dark petals through the haze, dusting away the stars. Through the water's clamour, the faraway rush of traffic and oncoming night, Keith turns forward.

"You got it?"

"Maybe." Keith's gaze sweeps the stones and comes up again, a look like a star slung backwards, tumbling dark into full burning day. "I'm not sure yet. Can you just trust me?"

His teeth catch; his fist wrings and knots. He breathes and the words beat under his ribs like radiation pressure. Instinct stirs, frantic and animal: he should shield his eyes, it tells him, or turn his head. There's a reason that beasts bow under the sun—why human beings make magnetic imaging and eclipse glasses. Light's a wave and a particle; it has its own force. It wrecks and escapes and exposes. This is not a moment that either of them can hold onto.

But he keeps in step. He smiles.

"Every time," Shiro promises: low and easy, as he would a hundred times over. "I'm in your hands, flyboy."

 

# *

 

They eat dinner in a cafe, a hasty froth of coffee cups and crescent rolls wafting yeast and cream. A flurry of coins and they're out again, soldiering across a new bridge lined with iron lamps and old plaques fingertipped gold. 

Back to modernity. At dusk, Prague had been a wonder of clean lines and blossoming ornaments. Carvings dripped around its window-frames in vines and red flowers. Across the skyline, every roof snarled into new curves and spires, everything sunstruck under the dissolving day; windows craned out from their boxes, and the spaces between crowded with saints on guard. But full night remakes the city. Shadows drain the glow from the pearled walls, and dozy lamplight floods the hollows between its medieval arches, dazzling its prim straight angles into a mazy wonderland. 

And yet—after Rome and Paris, it feels impossible to get lost. Keith steers them north. All the conveniences of contemporary design flow back into view—betrayed only here and there by gasping statues and saints. The streets fall into an easy pattern, one rolling after another into the same crammed avenue. Lanterns strike alight to line their curving path as they go. Souvenir shops slot in next to pulsing neon bars; new awnings blink under worn stone. 

But there's a self-consciousness to the district, even in the dark: signs in English laid over the Czech; buildings drawn in the pinks and pale creamy green of layered cakes; a cathedral's clockface inlaid with new gold, light crystallising along its mesh and arches, the thorns of its brittle latticework drawn sharp enough to stab into the long night. History without monuments—all the old glories kept and caged and reframed for the eyes of a new century. Whatever grief and heart Prague carries in its bones, they aren't here.

Keith, of course, isn't looking. His head's held high, snapping through the spires and the bone-yellow houses, everything but the end-goal filtered out, suspended.

"Can I ask for a hint?"

The question flashes through him, and its meaning quick after. In the long teeth of a castle turret's shadow, Keith wheels. "I know where I'm going, Shiro."

Caught out again—Shiro knuckles his smile from the corners of his mouth. "I figured," he confesses to a thumb. "And to be honest, I wouldn't be opposed to taking the scenic route if you weren't. You just seem like you're in kind of a hurry."

"This is how I always look."

"You'd be surprised. I've seen a couple variations in my time. Is there," Shiro says, circling back, "a deadline on this?"

Keith's frown holds, but his lashes stutter; his lips pinch with a thought not quite boxed into words. "Not exactly. I don't even know if there _is_ —anything to see."

"But it's worth trying."

His answer's felt more than heard: light slipping into Keith's gaze, the shadow that flutters and stills down his jaw. He reaches out, faultless in trust. Their fingers lace.

It feels like wandering again, the city spun into a sequence of piecemeal miracles. They slope through the slim shopping lanes and out to a little plaza with hotels blazing grand as cathedrals on every side. Some market's crowded into the square, torn it with the throes of a nameless celebration. The night's a riot of swinging lamps and red tents shot with gold. A little breeze skirts between them, winding with tobacco, frying bread, mulled wine. Festival lights droop between posts, setting the little bulbs to blink and reel with bubbling laughter.

Maybe summer's reason enough for this: life, sheer and candlestruck, singing into a murky, starless night.

They don't linger. Slowly the clamour empties from their shadows. The fairy-tale splendour of the historical churches hunch in on themselves again: angles and faceted turrets clinging to boxy frames, conscious of their own space in a way that Venice's sprawling cathedrals never were. The earth shakes, cobblestones to rails; the metro-train ribbons by in a crisp steel breath. District swings into district; Prague pieces itself together in one, sharp-ruled buildings and slanted rows of parked cars, and tumbles to age again in the next.

He almost misses the end when it comes: a squat little building crammed at the back of a parking lot, fluorescent enough to light the street alone and palely loitering. It's only as they hit the crosswalk that it clicks: the gap-toothed rows of parked cars, the letters AUTO chalked to sparkle across the glass.

"Really?"

At once Keith stops. The frown settles on him like snow, deepening through the hush. "Do you not want to?"

With care, Shiro tugs him out from the middle of the street. A car tears through their shadows, horn and engines snarling, just as their heels catch on the sidewalk. "Actually, I was kind of worried you were taking us to another nightclub. But I'm assuming this isn't the end of the line tonight."

Keith glances at the door, then back. "It's a business, Shiro," he says. "There's probably people waiting already. You kind of have to start at the end of the line."

A little silence curls into the street as Shiro stares, hollow-eyed, into the long shadow of history. "I've been a pretty bad influence on you," he says, "haven't I." 

"Could've been worse," Keith says, ruthless and casual, and pulls him into the car rental agency.

It takes three cards from Shiro—driver's license, Garrison ID, credit—and a surcharge for driving while young, but the clerk takes them out to the row of gangling machines at the back of the lot. Shiro keeps his wrists tucked behind him while Keith skulks up and down the line, swiping over the edges of tires, muttering about cheap monocoque builds.

"Have you driven a lot of these?"

In answer, Keith stops over something like a sea-tide turned to wheels: red chrome curves cresting into a windshield's crystal display. He swaps nods with the clerk—the brusque and unspeakable respect of two people who know far too much about motorcycles—and the clerk snaps the clipboard out for Shiro's signature.

The formalities tied up, its keys go chiming into the air, and Keith snatches them out from their bright arc. He's already slung a leg over the glossy seat. His smile catches through the haze like a match striking. "Don't worry," he says. "It's not like any of these could beat the cartjumper for speed anyway."

Shiro only laughs as he settles himself behind; but the sound's breathless already, shivering with the current of a promise thrumming down to his marrows. "Even with the way you drive?" he says. "That's almost sad."

Through the mirror, Keith's grin cracks wide. He twists the key.

 

# *

 

Whatever simmering grudge Prague's ever held against pedestrians, it boils twice as hot for motorcyclists. The horns start as soon as wheel grinds into cement, shrilling and grunting. Keith doesn't even try to compromise. He takes corners on a dime's spin; he veers and clips from street to walkways, chasing a ruthless line down through the sodium glare of the city lamps, trailing a storm of shouts and horns behind them. Down the avenues they go, chasing the river with Shiro's arm wrapped around his ribs, a fever burning between them, heavier with every flicker and beat.

Downtown's carvings and its arch, stencilled windows give way, snuffed out by distance like parchment going up in smoke. The street's a string of snapshot bursts in passing: spotted stones, white flaking off age-bitten wood, barred windows glowing through the wings of outstretched trees. Traffic lights whistle overhead like fireworks, _green-yellow-yellow,_ and through the slicing winds, Shiro watches the dial tick up, twitching past a hundred, one-twenty, onward—

A shout thrums through his fingers: Keith's bawling some warning into the roar. Shiro breathes out, shuddery and close, heat filming white over the helmet's glass. His grip grinds tight.

On they ride into the night, clouds massing along the way like a storm pinned back, chasing the knife of a highbeam shot through the miles of shadows ahead.

Roadsigns, skeletal fences, graffiti bubbling across cement under a reeking bridge. The streets empty into cracks and grainy curves. A row of trees wings backward with a lash of wind, their silhouettes blind as anything else in the dark. Nothing's there to witness the moment that Keith's attention snaps to a weedy, overgrown turn, and he jerks the bike towards it.

The motorcycle purrs to rest at the brink, where cement crumbles into grass and stripped riverbank. The landing's smeary with dirt and netted in weedstalks. The bridge stretches over their heads, a skeleton in silhouette, winking with rust.

Keith cuts the engine. His voice burns in Shiro's chest, but not loud enough to char through the ringing in his ears.

"What?"

The helmets come off. Keith twists back, hair whipped to a tangle and his eyes rising like constellations. "I said, we found it."

They leave the motorcycle under a fringe of trailing branches. There's a little footpath up the slope, jagged and steep as a goat's climb of choice, and studded with dark rocks. Lamps paint a film of gold over the bridge's railings and studded arches, pooling along the dull wooden walkway. Across the water, Prague blurs into a mute silhouette, turrets and curving high-rises haloed in neon.

By reflex, Shiro looks up.

"I asked around," Keith says. "They don't do a lot of stargazing down there—this is probably the best we're going to get while we're out here."

Overhead: Cassiopeia, Draco, Cepheus. Andromeda clasping Perseus, undying. A flood of stars surging out from Prague's spangling lights and across the waters, tracing out the shape of an unseen night.

All throughout the dusk, the streetlights and towers had hidden this. On another bridge, he'd wondered—then left the thought behind. There were castles in Prague, historical bridges and wonders, all the stuff of tourist gossip. Trust Keith to bring him out to the single place that he'd have never thought to look for. 

"Thanks, Keith," he says, too low. "Really."

"Don't," Keith says, stiff down to his bones. He braces against the railing, elbows along its wiry edge. "The view isn't even that great."

A straying wind's snapped through his hair, raking up its tufts. But he's looking at Shiro with the same fierce, fixed clarity—star-eyed, with the kind of gravity that pulls tight the space between them.

Silence strays through the light, words on the cusp of hearing. _Soon,_ he'd told himself. Soon they'd talk about it. Soon he'd come up with the right goodbyes, the kinder things to say, and lay all the uneasy whispers in their orbit to rest. But there'd been moments in the sun, hands linked through their scurrying, headlong run; his teeth scraping sugar off of Keith's thumb; a candle's glint stroking down Keith's jaw, luridly promising under a holy silence—

He's made so many excuses over time.

"You know," Shiro says. "It won't be that much better on the ship. We'll be getting a good look at the planets along the way, but the constellations'll still just be constellations."

"If there's something you want to say," Keith says, "just say it."

Caught, and not for the first time—but then, Keith has a brutal knack for that: finding his way into the spaces that Shiro's circling. Shiro makes his way forward; he comes to rest at the railing, head bowed under the heavy brand of Keith's stare. "I'm still trying to figure everything out," he says.

Like all his best hypocrisies, it's as true as it isn't. They'd had a thousand signs before Prague, clean as snapshots: ironic salutes snapped across the corridors; whispers of _my dad used to tell me that_ ; Keith's shadow trailing his steps around the rippling edge of the neutral buoyancy lab; Keith twisting away from an officer's sneer, his shoulder bowing under Shiro's touch.

It hadn't always been true. For all his quickness, Keith changes slower than stone does. He's outlived too much; left to himself, he brims still with a need like light, raw and hungry for something without a name. And yet, in a handful of years, he's changed—grown out of his coltish stumbling and the contempt that'd once flashed through his teeth with every tap and turn. 

Keith's changed, and for a reason. 

"We've been going about this in a pretty weird way," Shiro says, "haven't we?" A slow hand rakes through his hair—it crumples at his nape in fragile anchor. "Why didn't you say anything before?"

"Why would I?" Keith says. It tumbles out of him like exhaust. "It's not like it matters."

 _It's not like it matters._ He hears it again in echoes, ringing, ridiculous. A constellation's worth of memories spin through the backs of his eyelids. Their stardust clings in his throat.

There's an easier way to argue with Keith, he knows—this boy with his knotted fists and vicious turns, who takes slowing down as a personal challenge. For a moment, he lets the impulse tide over him: muscle memory catching static in his fingertips, Keith's pulse under his skin, the promise of salt and heat flaring all the way to the backs of his teeth.

But he swallows. "I don't know what kind of ideas I've been giving you," Shiro says with care. "But it matters to me."

"I didn't mean it like that."

"All right," Shiro says, and means it. "Then what?"

"I—" Keith slings a glance over the waves below. Syllables scrabble in his teeth, splintered and meaningless, before he snaps back. "I _miss_ you. All right?"

"You miss me."

Another echo, shivered and gone. It's not quite the answer he might have guessed. But Keith's taken over; his words cracks the emptiness, flare after helpless flare.

"I don't know what else to call it—but that's how it feels. Even before we flew out, I started looking for you. I can't stop, even when I know exactly where you are. Right now, you're standing in front of me and it _still_ feels like I'm missing part of you. Like if I just hold on hard enough—" his fists shudder over steel; his voice thickens with his swallow. "I know it doesn't make sense. Nothing about this does. But every time I look at you, I just want to—" 

Silence cuts between them. Keith wrenches his head down.

"Keith," Shiro says, and it wracks through Keith's shoulders.

"I _can't_ ," Keith grates.

Shiro looks at him: his scratched knuckles, gritting tighter with every second, the flex and strain of his jaw, his dark lashes stinging with light. In all their time, he's never asked about Keith's bruises and scars—only brought him bandages, listened to his fuming curses, reached out to steady him when he jarred into a desk and winced too hard. He'd thought it was enough.

But hurting has a way of reframing the world over time. He'd thought of it in Paris, and again on a noon-lit train to Venice. Love is an instinct, but all its gestures are learned. Over the years, Shiro's taken his lessons from film-screens and books and careful, trusted hands: kisses, caresses, slow fingertips smoothing the fever from his skin. An arm slung over his shoulders, pride and laughter smudged into his ear. A back settled against his in the dark, when he couldn't bear to look at anyone else. Love pressed into muscle memory until it became second nature.

That was his world. There are others.

In theory, then: there's a world where feeling can only be framed in the language of loss—not _I love you_ , but _I miss you_. There's a world where love lives as the edge opposite to fear, where it's carried like a knife between the ribs. A world whose last memory of love was a photograph, a secret, grave dirt under his nails. A world where grief is a monument—a fixed point, true as north, by which all future travels must be mapped. 

Let go of grief, and what of love would be left?

Bruises, scars, muscle memory. There's an answer that all of them have in common. It's the one thing that Shiro no longer has.

And yet.

"All right," Shiro says again. He faces forward, watching the riverlights lacing, swaying. "Is there something I can do?"

The bridge clanks and groans. Waves beat against the pillars beneath, murmurs into a deepening silence.

"Tell me," Keith says. "Tell me that _feeling_ this doesn't matter. Tell me this is stupid—that waiting for you's not going to make you come back any faster. I already know it's true. I just need to hear you say it." His breath catches in his teeth, graveling, scraped down to bone. "Tell me to get over this, and trust you. Tell me—that I can do that."

His voice has risen, and Shiro's gaze with it. For a moment, he just looks—spoils himself on staring the way he's done for too long. His eyes follow the bright slope of Keith's throat, the way the shadows shift and unravel around muscles at work; they trail his fringed hair as it tumbles and tufts over his eyes, sketch the vicious twist of his grip along the steely rail.

The thing about Keith is this: he's never learned to let go. What he takes, he holds fast.

A laugh puffs out of him, more air than feeling. But Shiro presses his palm over Keith's knuckles. He leans through the mazy night as Keith's head snaps up, pressing their foreheads together.

"You can do anything you want, Keith," he says. In the dark, Keith's mouth parts under his, suspended by merest stars. "You always have. You're right—technically, feeling it doesn't make a difference. You don't have to be sad that I'm going. You don't have to wait for me to come back." 

A breath trembles between them: shock-short, unyielding. If he lifted his hand, Shiro knows, he could trace the shiver from Keith's clenched teeth down the line of his jaw, feel the root of it tick beneath his touch. He wants to. He wants everything.

"But I'll miss you," he says.

Impact: Keith's fingers snap along his shoulder in a bruisy constellation, pinning him into place. "I know you," Keith says, a promise like smoke to his tongue. "You're going to come back."

"In ten months, yeah. That's the plan. It doesn't change how I feel about it now."

"Yeah?" It's a sigh, a little flame. "Tell me."

 _Tell me_ , echo into echo—as if there could be a new answer between them. As if he can't feel the answer hammering against his ribs, skimming shaky fingers down the edge of his throat.

"Like I'm missing you already," Shiro says: aching and ashen, a whisper raw as a firebrand. "Like it's never going to stop."

Keith kisses him first.

It's nearly careful: a kiss still feeling out its edges, breathing heat as the shape of his mouth goes soft and sweetly coaxing. Under the pooled lights, he strokes a thumb down the stern set of Keith's jaw, smoothing along its steel and restless ache, in a line that he's never and always known. It can't go on, it can't last—and still Keith's pushing against him, sharp hips and fever-heat, crowding him back against the railing. His dark head cranes up and his mouth parts, and the night's an endless roar in his ears, galaxies firing bright overhead as Shiro holds on.

 

# *

 

Photograph: a hotel room, lit gold and jarred to an angle. There's a door meshed in three lights, bathroom and overhead and lamp; a curving chair-leg and the glint of a plump cushion; the clean curves of a lamp spiralling out to gleaming fractal echoes. A blurry figure's just crossed the white stripe of the frame, torn from some fresh gust of a summer storm. His gauzy hair's spangled in droplets, his mouth a smeared but vivid threat. One hand's swiping up the hem of his dark undershirt, bare stomach flashing beneath his knuckles.

Two of the photographer's fingers blotch the lower-right corner—startled and far too late to block out the camera's merciless eye from the show.

 

# *

 

By Stockholm, the routine's settled. The cartjumper sails sweetly to its rest on the landing pad. Ditching a delighted Fraser to a cluster of white coats and ties, they tear past the city's squared and lofty offices to the neon-lettered train station. They ride the new rail for two hours, its glossy roar churning under their heels like a tide. At Keith's instruction, they disembark at Delsbo: a suburban sprawl scraped bare, with none of Stockholm's brittle, straight-ruled modernity. Just empty lots and squat houses under vaulted metal roofs.

They trek out past the railguards, over knolls burning green, defying the summer to end. A storm had crossed their train on the way up to the town, lashing silver and rattling glass. The sky's barely cleared; they cross the field into a heat-dazed world still breathing on the verge of mist.

Shiro sees the end before he understands it: just a pair of blocks standing in a stretch of abandoned grass. In silence, he follows, boots stamping tracks across the yielding earth, two pilots out of uniform, red and gold like living coals in a world made new by rain.

"It's Pluto," Keith says. He stops before the first chiselled block, knuckling over the sign.

"Pluto."

"A couple decades ago, Sweden decided that they wanted to build a model of the solar system in the city. They were supposed to scale it down by about twenty million so that they could get it exactly right." Keith lifts his head. His gaze lashes across the length of the field and back, narrowing through some complicated, wordless conversion from sight to space. "This still seems a little close, though."

Keith has this look when he's utterly intent: brows stitched black, the blade of his jaw sharpened into a shadowless line, the kind of laser-focus that slips through all its photographs and leaves its shape only in bruising impact. No photograph could hold onto this; no layering of sense-memory will ever be enough. But he has to try.

"Not to mention," Shiro says, "all the other things it's missing. I heard Pluto was supposed to be uninhabitable."

"If you really want vaporised nitrogen and methane, you could ask around the labs. Or," Keith says, arms crossed, "you could just wait until the real thing."

Shiro laughs. "No, you're right. Pluto's Pluto." Keith's still circling the block, hunched as if folding down wings unseen, a little too studious. "View's a lot better out here than I thought it'd be."

"Do you have to _say_ it like that?"

In spite of himself, his smile's stealing back. "Well," Shiro says, soft and fond, "how would you describe it?"

Keith turns. The last of his focus slips, guttering under sudden, reddening effort. "I don't know," he says at last. "I keep—getting stuck, looking at you."

On the rattling train. In the agency's fluorescent lights. Under the filtering gold of the hotel lamp before he'd reached over Keith's lidding eyes to flick the switch. They keep doing that, looking at each other like brushes of static: caught, stung, and jolted away again. It'd be ridiculous to think that he was the only one who'd felt it.

His hands sway at his sides; his throat burns through his swallow. "You always have to outdo me," Shiro says. "First my mission, and now this."

"What? How am I outdoing your mission?"

Shiro jerks a thumb to the stone. "In this case, I think hitting orbit around Pluto's just about close enough to making it to Kerberos," he says. "See? You're breaking my records before I can even set them."

It's scant comfort for either of them—less, for a boy who lives on grudges and literalisms. But Keith holds his chin high, eyes starry with defiance. "So just break mine," he says.

"And make the round-trip from Kerberos in _three_ hours? I thought your idea of a challenge was bad enough already, but they're getting worse with time."

"Yeah, well. When have things been easy for either of us?"

It rings across the field, too loud—sound torn red out of his lungs, every word like shrapnel.

"Keith," he says.

"I know. I still think—whatever we decide out here, it's not going to change anything. It's just a promise. It's not going to bend the laws of physics. You're going to Kerberos and you're going to be gone for ten months. A lot can happen in a year. Maybe you'll realise you were meant to be up there. Maybe you'll change your mind. Even a promise feels like a bad idea."

"But."

He's stepped forward, and Keith takes up the rest of the movement, driven into his space like something falling, falling. Hand wraps over hand, clasping the word like a secret between them. Their heads tip together, lips stopped one breath short.

"But," Keith echoes, low as starlight in a city street. "Even if it's pointless, or bad luck, or it doesn't last—even if _missing you_ isn't going to do anything, I'm going to be waiting for you, Shiro. I want to."

They're too close. The promise burns in an airless flame, an ache and a dizzy light. He wants to trace and reshape it in kiss after kiss, wants the taste of it on Keith's tongue. He wants and wants. In a way he's no better than Keith has been—taking reels of photographs, holding onto his hand as if to bruise his grip into muscle memory. The light won't stay. It never has.

But it isn't the singular moment that matters.

"Don't get ahead of yourself. We've still got a week left. And Keith—no matter what else happens," Shiro says, very grave, "I want you to know one thing."

"Yeah?"

"We'll always have Paris."

Keith's brows twitch, pinching over his dead eyes. "I don't know if I want to kiss you anymore," he says.

But Shiro's tugging him in again—pressing their foreheads together, helpless and smiling through a stinging little sputter. "So don't," he tells Keith's rising scowl. "Not yet. Let me make it up to you first."

 

# *

 

Of all the personal effects that Takashi Shirogane leaves to the Garrison, there's one that they'll never find.

The photograph's a clumsy arrangement, a bad angle and worse timing. A thumb curves out from its edge like a second border. Sunlight glazes a sea of rumpled sheets, dazzling out the subtleties from the pixelated colours. The subjects are thin traceries under the haze: here a bare shoulder, smudgy in gold, there the drowsy shadow of a face.

It takes a knowing eye to filter to its essentials: Shiro, reduced to tufts of inky bed hair and a face soft with sleep. Keith caught in the crook of his arm, eyes sleep-lidded and mouth turned inches from Shiro's ear. He's wrangled loose one arm, craned it just enough for the shot. Under the blurry morning, his head tips to a side, pressing his mouth to Shiro's jaw for the quiet satisfaction of feeling him there.

He'll forget these things later. The count and secret heat of Shiro's pulse in his fingertips. Whether the stubble had scraped his lips like sand. Whether he'd been numb to his toes or his thigh before he kicked his legs out from Shiro's ruthless draping. Time dictates this much: sense by sense, the details will dissolve, leave him with only shaking hands on a brittle frame, a desert wind whistling through the slats. 

But that's later, elsewhen—the province of physics, of sense-memories lost, of a boy collecting scraps for a new monument. In photograph-time, it's still and always summer. Shiro's arm curving warm beneath him and Keith's smile a secret buried in bare skin. Always, this is how he will remember them: at rest, tangled and sprawling, dreaming together under morning light.

 

# *

 


End file.
